Let it snow...

We had 30 inches of snow dumped on us over the weekend. Here are some pictures of us digging out.

BigDog v. Roxxxy: robots that you fight and ....

BigDog is a cool robot that looks like a giant headless dog. It was design to carry supplies over almost any terrain. The video below is from 2008, and is impressive. I especially like it crossing ice, and jumping.

So now the next step; "DARPA just awarded a $32 million contract to build it.
The contract's been won by maker Boston Dynamics, which has just 30 months to turn the research prototype machines into a genuine load-toting, four-legged, semi-intelligent war robot--"first walk-out" of the newly-designated LS3 is scheduled in 2012."

"LS3 stands for Legged Squad Support System, and that pretty much sums up what the device is all about: It's a semi-autonomous assistant designed to follow soldiers and Marines across the battlefield, carrying up to 400 pounds of gear and enough fuel to keep it going for 24 hours over a march of 20 miles."

Meanwhile the inventor of Roxxxy the adult robot has named his price. "Meet Roxxxy, who may be the world's most sophisticated talking female sex robot. For $7,000, she's all yours.
"She doesn't vacuum or cook, but she does almost everything else," said her inventor, Douglas Hines, who unveiled Roxxxy last month at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada."

Again I wonder which robot will cause the most problems over the world in the next 20 years.

Guarding Life's Dark Secrets

I have been interested in privacy, focusing on electronic information privacy for several years. Wanting to read more on privacy, in a more legal perspective, I searched on Amazon and found this book; "Guarding Life's Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety, and Privacy". It is an interesting look at the history of reputation and privacy, from the Victorian era through today. A good, interesting read.

So are you supposed to marry the robot or.....

So everyone knew this day would come, when robots started to move into the bed room. This week a new robot was announced, meet Roxxxy.
From the article; "A former Bell Labs scientist, Douglas Hines, has unveiled what he describes as the world's first sex robot: "She's a companion. She listens to you. She speaks. She feels your touch. She goes to sleep." Christened "Roxxxy," the robot has life-like silicone skin, a mechanical heart, and five personality options ranging from "Wild Wendy" to "Mature Martha." Read more if you want to, beware some content may not be work or kid friendly.

So while new and unusual, this is not surprising. Science fiction stories have been telling us this would happen. Human nature tells us this would happen. But what is more unusual, sex with a robot, or falling in love with a robot.

From the article; "Inventor Le Trung spent Christmas Day with the most important woman in his life - his robot Aiko.The science genius enjoyed a festive dinner with his mum, dad and his £30,000 fembot which he designed and built by hand.Le, 34, from Brampton, Ontario, Canada, even bought gifts for his dream girl, who is so lifelike she speaks fluent English and Japanese, helped cook the turkey and hang up decorations.'Aiko is like any woman, she enjoys getting new clothes,' he said.'I loved buying them for her too.'

What can you say about young robot love? I wonder if in the future we will talk or interact with people at all.

Back to School and I Hate Paper Books

I finished registration today for Cyberlaw courses and it was an interesting experience on lots of levels. First, I felt quite out of place with all the young kids running around. By “young” I mean late teens, early 20’s. Second, I don’t enjoy academia, I have never enjoyed school. Third, I hate paper books.
Since getting my Kindle in 2009, I have read three non-technical books. That is three more than I have read in the last 5 years. The features to enlarge text, convert text to speech, and automatically provide word definitions and notes in book make it very useful. These features make it invaluable to me to provide the most efficient way for me to input information into my brain.
So back to the point, I went to the college bookstore to get my required books, hoping to find at least a couple later on Amazon.com for Kindle, maybe in PDF format on supplemental CD like a lot of technical books nowadays. Long story short, no such luck. The only options were electronic format was e-book for a couple titles, and that format is not compatible with Kindle.
So why don’t textbooks support more electronic formats? Money in resale. The textbook companies make money over and over again on the resale of book at only a slightly discounted price. Like the newspapers before them, they have no idea how to make money in this new media, so they are squeezing every cent they can get now, before they end up like the newspapers: bankrupt. In the meantime, we will have to keep paying top money for used books.

The Killer App of 1900

"A hundred years ago, lighting was the killer app for electricity, the thing that made it worthwhile to have installed. No one particularly understood what else electricity might bring to the mass market, because other uses were generally specialized, the province of experts, the wealthy, or industry. Compressors to allow refrigeration and freezing, electric heat, and other innovations came later to homes."
This is an interesting articel that compares electricity 100 years ago to broadband access today. Here is a section that if you replace the word electricity with broadband it could be used today.
"In researching a KUOW segment airing soon about the digital divide and Seattle’s particular problems with broadband, I found this marvelous statement from Oct. 24, 1905, in the Richmond, Virginia, Times-Dispatch newspaper. A lawyer named Henry Anderson was arguing on behalf of two clients of the city who didn’t want to be taxed to pay for a municipal utility. Among other arguments against municipal ownership, he said, eloquently:
“Unless we adopt the principles of socialism, It can hardly be contended that It is the province of government, either state or municipal, to undertake the manufacture or supply of the ordinary subjects of trade and commerce, or to impose burdens upon the whole community for the supposed benefit of a few….
“The ownership and operation of municipal light plants stands upon a different basis from that of the ownership of water works, with which it is so often compared. Water is a necessity to the health and life of every individual member of a community…It must be supplied in order to preserve the public health, whether it can be done profitably or not, and must be furnished, not to a few individuals, but to every individual.
“Electric lights are different. Electricity is not in any sense a necessity, and under no conditions is it universally used by the people of a community. It is but a luxury enjoyed by a small proportion of the members of any municipality, and yet if the plant be owned and operated by the city, the burden of such ownership and operation must be borne by all the people through taxation.
“Now, electric light is not a necessity for every member of the community. It Is not the business of any one to see that I use electricity, or gas, or oil in my house, or even that I use any form of artificial light at all.”
When will we listen to the past?

A Review Of The Best Robots of 2009

This is an articel that lists some cool robots and achivements in 2009. Cool videos too.
http://singularityhub.com/2009/12/22/a-review-of-the-best-robots-of-2009/

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Good night.

FLL Brick Breakers Recognized

It has been my privilege to coach my first FLL team this year. Over the last 10 weeks, we as mentors and coaches have tried to support a group of six kids, ages 5 to 12, to learn about FIRST, science and technology, and to begin developing the soft and hard skills they can use for the rest of their lives.

On Saturday December 12th 2009, the Brick Breakers team #394 competed against 16 other teams, in their first Maryland FLL Qualifier tournament at the South County Showdown, sponsored by the Power Hawks. Being a young team (with some members even younger than the suggested guidelines) and the majority of the members new to FLL, we set realistic goals for our team. We wanted to complete at least two of the robot missions, focus on a reasonable topic as part of the Smart Move theme, and work together as a team.

I am happy to announce that the Brick Breakers were recognized by the judges with the Rookie All-Star Award. This award “Celebrates the rookie team exemplifying a young but strong partnership effort, as well as implementing the mission of FIRST to inspire students to learn more about science and technology.”

From tolen.net

I am proud of the team’s efforts this season. They were able to show their potential to the judges, score the fourth highest in the robotic competition, and act as a team throughout a very long day. Congratulations to the Brick Breakers, and all the teams at the competition.

Please visit www.tolen.org for more pictures and details about the team.

www.tolen.org

As some may know, we are doing FLL again this year. I have let the team use the www.tolen.org site to post their information and pictures for this year. When you get a change please go and visit.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Parrothead Security Theater

This summer I took a few days off and went to a Jimmy Buffett with some Parrotheads. My first tailgating experience was fun, and Jimmy Buffett puts on a great concert. You have to respect a talented entertainer.
The venue was not something I was impressed with. The concert was at Nissan Pavilion in VA. It was overpriced for parking, they stuck the tailgaters as far away as humanly possible, but those are not my main complaints. My complaint is the illusion of security, or Security Theater. (I would normally link the term “illusion of security” to Wikipedia for a reference, however on Wikipedia the term redirects to the “United States Department of Homeland Security”.)
Security Theater is just that: when something is done which people claim provides more security, yet it has little to no impact on any actual security. Airport security is like that in a lot of ways. I don’t need to go into great detail about airport security, read the reports and articles.
Security should be about ease of use, work factor, frequency and value. If it is too hard to use, people will not use it, no matter the security it provides. Make something harder to break into, and the less likely it is that someone will bother, they will probably move on to an easier one. Why protect against flooding when it floods once every 100 years and it hasn’t rained? Don’t protect a 100K with a five dollar lock box, and don’t buy a 100K safe to protect 5 dollars. This is an overly simplified view of security, but I am sick of everyone being told to be scared, and people not thinking, so I started ranting again…
So back at Nissan Pavilion, four of us are heading to the gates, to find a crowd of people being funneled into 6 to 10 gates, I do not have an actual count of gates, however there is no crowd control. There were no barriers, no fences to direct traffic, no signs to tell everyone that they want women on the left and men on the right to get frisked. There were also no signs to say “No Cameras” (note that on the website it stated no professional camera, but they were turning all cameras away.) It was a mass of at least 300 people trying to get into a Jimmy Buffett concert, and things then started to get ugly. People started yelling at each other, pushing, and getting mad. Why? Because every person had to be frisked, and show what’s in their pockets to the yellow shirt people at each gate. At one point we saw two separate arguments on either side of our group about people cutting in front of others when the entire front of the crowd was shoved forward by the back. The situation was beginning to escalate. Finally someone in a white staff shirt jogged down the line and stopped by each yellow shirted person doing the frisking and told them to “let’em through.” I was thankful some noticed the situation for what it was, before something serious happened and someone got hurt, but it made me mad that this was all done in the name of security.

FLL 2009 robot test 2

We are coaching a FIRST Lego League (FLL) team this year. The team has named themselves the 'Brick Breakers'. They are testing some robot bases and decided to video it. This was test two.

FLL 2009 robot test 1

We are coaching a FIRST Lego League (FLL) team this year. The team has named themselves the 'Brick Breakers'. They are testing some robot bases and decided to video it. This was test one.

A New Hobby

As a little kid I always loved finding things. I would pride myself at looking until I found what I was looking for, checking places off in my mind and thinking of new places to look for the lost items. So when I was shown a metal detector as a young kid I was more than excited about the new items it could help me find. I never had one of my own, they were always too expensive when I had money or I had no time for it when I did have some extra money.
This recently changed, thanks to a bonus program at work. I collected enough points this year and decided to give to myself. I received a Bounty Hunter IV Metal detector and I really enjoy it. It is almost as relaxing as hitting golf balls at the driving range. I will write a more indepth review later, but in short, it is everything you need to learn the basics of Metal Detecting. I have sweeped most of my yard, next stop is the beach!

Another video from the new ipod

Another video from the kids. This one is loud. Cameo of the cat.