steve barrett

I’m not sure why I don’t remember this show since I’m sure I was the prime marketing target for this type of thing. I suppose that could be the reason it was canceled after 1 season; though watching the trailer leads me to believe otherwise. For one, this was created by the same group that introduced us to Baywatch. I have a feeling the older audience was either still busy watching Baywatch or simply getting tired of the pathetic excuses to show women in Bikinis on TV. Not to mention Terry “Hulk” Hogan, whom we’re somehow lead to believe became the sole proprietor of the most bad ass boat known to man.

I guess its rather easy to see why Thunder in Paradise was canceled.

The Icon A5 has just undergone the first test flight. Targeted for a release in late 2010. at $139,000 plus 4,000 for a special sport license this isnt that bad of a deal and might help to push small engine aircraft into the general public’s range.

via wired

At first I was confused, then I realized it’s nothing more than a large number of unsupervised youth playing with explosives - just like my younger days. I don’t recall launching a hammer high into the air over a crowd of people. I wonder where that thing landed.

The plan is to drop them from aircraft and annoy everyone on the planet.

They Hatin…

This is the Joint Strike Fighter, aka F-35, taking off and landing vertically. This was developed as a shared asset between several nations like Australia, Israel and Japan. You can see a long list of similarities with the American F-22 which was also developed by Lockheed Martin. The major difference is that the F-35 uses a standard afterburner while the F-22 has dual afterburning turbofans with thrust vectoring. You can sort of see the vectoring mechanism in the early part of the following video.

This is some pretty cool engineering. The backpack is clunkly looking but I’ll take it, there must be some sort of counterweight in there to keep Murata Boy steady. The technology is probably similar to that of a segway; some sort of gyroscope watching for drift, and then compensating.

Here’s an earlier view, from 2006, that gives some insight into the development process. I think this video’s more exciting than the first because of some of the unique tests they have the robot

You’re looking at Julio, a robot singing to a recording of David Byrne of the Talking Heads. Julio was built by David Hanson and chronicled on Hanson’s blog. Hanson has a great collection of other videos at his website. David says he designed Julio to study the “uncanny valley.” Instead of giving you a wonky description I’ll just include the wikipedia low-down

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness….

…The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is “almost human”, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of “strangeness” in the human viewer. In other words, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a good job at pretending to be human, but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person.

I find this to be a pretty interesting concept. Something so close to real it’s harder to personify than a cartoon? It’s as though people have an easier time humanizing an object if its obviously not real than they do personifying a 99% accurate recreation.

An article published by Washington University in St. Louis claims that the American Military will be roughly 30% robotic by 2020. This includes everything from crawling scouts, unmanned automatic UAVs, self-driving convoys, and job specific bots like the robo dog.

Sounds like a pretty accurate estimate to me.

Look, I don’t get into politics too often because most often it just turns into an argument, but this snippet I thought was worth sharing. I’m sure everyone across America has seen the recent McCain ad that compares Obama to celebrities like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. If not I’m sure you caught word of it or saw some reporting on it because that SHIT WAS EVERYWHERE. Anyway, I’m here to spread the other end of it.

Paris Hilton created a rebuttal advertisement, calling McCain out and thanking him for even more publicity. I think this is an awesome approach to the libelous character degradation McCain paid to create and distribute.

Now I don’t think this is actually being broadcast across America, but it’s most certainly being circulated around the net and I have no doubt this will be seen by a very influential segment of America’s voters. McCain fouled this one and it’s going to be a pop culture joke for quite some time.