I can only describe Tesla Down Under as a real Mad Science Fair. No sign of Tongue-Tongue or Dr. Mung-Mung, sadly.
ASCII has a nicely detailed account of how the sysop of the first BBS got the computer to answer the phone. Now that is hacking in the original sense of the term.
Finally, the Lifesuit is a robotic exoskeleton powered by compressed air and the BASIC Stamp. Its creator, Monty Reed, hopes that it will someday allow the disabled to walk again.
Since I read this post without commenting, I now face being tormented not only with improper sentences having excessive exclamation marks, but also with something involving ducks. The former is life on the Internet!!!!! but the latter is completely unacceptable. Therefore, I choose the honorable course of action and present Five Reasons I Blog:
Behold the underactuated prosthetic fingertip!
Quite possibly the most impressive thing I’ve seen all day.
The readers have spoken. The Electronic Replicant’s newest feature will be a weekly webcomic!
There’s also a new poll up for your entertainment.
Electroplankton calls our attention to this article. Although it seems the existence of a "gay gene" is still contested, some researchers have found some biometrics that do seem to correspond with an individual being gay. For example, if a male’s hair swirls counterclockwise (as mine does) and his index finger is longer than his ring finger (as mine is), if he’s left-handed (I’m not), or if he has narrow fingerprint ridges (I don’t think so) then there’s a possibility that he’s gay (true, but you already knew that.)
This is surely good news for the gaydar-impaired (such as myself) but this study also raises the same troubling possibility that the facial pattern matching widget did. Data can be mined for evil as well as good.
Although it would be difficult to get people to enter "hair swirl direction" and "finger length ratio" into their (say) DMV forms, it wouldn’t be difficult to take their prints or determine which hand they used to sign the form. And while this data wouldn’t be conclusive, it could raise a pink flag. This might not be that useful to an organization that precisely targets individuals. But to an organization that’s after a population, especially if it doesn’t matter that a few fish escape the net, it might be useful indeed.
After volunteering for (and doing an excellent job with) the In-Infamous Five Question Meme, RaJ recently returned the favor by tagging me to do this Five-ulous Meme. It’s not like I’d have otherwise posted much today, or for that matter, yesterday or the day before. Maybe I might have squeezed out something along the lines of "I just installed Kubuntu on my old (and I do mean old) notebook and I’m still waiting for KDE to finish loading. Wait, my cursor just moved. And now it’s gone. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all."
So, let the memery begin!
INSTRUCTIONS: Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot, like so:
Next, select five people to tag:
I think that just the other day, I tagged almost everybody that could reasonably be expected to play along, so do take this as more of a wish-list than as a series of expectations.
And especially,
Check out this home-brewed pick-and-place machine for assembling circuit boards with surface-mounted components. This is even better than the Lego duck machine. I so want one.
Citybeat has an article on a proposed California bullet train and why it’s still only proposed. Basically, "it’s not cost-effective in the short term." See, it’s this sort of thinking that got us where we are today– and keeps us there– the focusing on short-term benefits and discounting the long-term implications. In the short term, building cars and drilling for oil is beneficial. Without them, America dies. And it’s precisely because of that fact that we need to consider suffering short-term penalties for long-term benefits. We can’t wait for the market to decide, because the market is too short-sighted.
And speaking of short-sighted, I heard on the radio this afternoon of a new bill that would give favorable postal rates to mass-media (such as Time-Warner) at the expense of smaller publishers. It is speculated that this would drive most small publishers toward an online-only format, and many out of business completely.
Until next time.. and hopefully by then I’l have something more robot-y to share with you..
The first of many, I hope, new things to come to this site is a poll widget. It should be found somewhere in the sidebar. The purpose of this poll is to find out what new feature my dear readers might like to see most. And feel free to leave a comment if you think of an option I’ve overlooked.
ERIK
