Back on Track
My friend Mrs Burg rapped me across the knuckles figuratively yesterday for being so lax about updating the blog, and truth to be told, I am ashamed of being so quiet. Especially after reading about the fashion blog Style Rookie last night, wherein a 13yr old girl is apparently setting the fashion world on it's head. I should at the very least be able to blog a few times a week about the world at large, right? Unfortunately I know next to nothing about fashion (just ask Dr Germ, Mrs Burg, or frankly anyone I have ever known) so I will just have to go with my old standby, nerdy crap.
Just read a lovely article about bipedal robots in the IEEE Spectrum. By lovely I don't refer to the prose but mainly the subject matter, which is sort of what I thought I'd be doing when I went to college. Or at least that by now I'd have a robot butler named JVs4.7 (pronounced "Jeeves 4 point 7") who would accompany me on adventures and always be ready with a sandwich, a cool drink and a monotone bon mot. But I digress. The point is that it's amazing to me that we've reached the stage we have and at the same time it's amazing to me that we're not further along. Even these robots are sort of gimmicky and prone to failure, they have battery life problems, stability problems and really what can they do that is useful? The REEM-B can pick up a bottle of Coke and pretend to pour it but doesn't seem to realize the cap is still on. Good job, Robot ... not! I can make fun of them now of course, since they're not sophisticated enough yet to take over and enslave us all but that's a far away future, right? (I should point out that the Justin robot out of Germany actually can see and follow, and remove caps and pour - we'll have to keep an eye out for that one).
I won't even get into the cyborg rats that they're building with half track hind legs.