This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about:
enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International Space Station. Technically, he IS out of our atmosphere and orbiting in space, though, he is only BARELY off-world. Consider the resources and history it took just to get him THIS far.
Meanwhile, he engages in this arguably “unproductive” act of pure beauty, playing a sonata written by a composer who’s been dead almost 200 years.
Ever so slowly but surely, this clip seems to make it all worth it:
perspective : technology integration and learning
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Via Gizmodo :
“The army’s machine-gun wielding, insurgent-slaying robot SWORDS is no longer spraying foes with hot doom in Iraq. Actually, it never got the chance to notch a single frag, and never will. Apparently, there was an incident where “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move,” meaning it totally pointed somewhere it wasn’t supposed to—like at friendlies, which resulted in recall from the field and might’ve set the program back 10-20 years, according to the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey.
He confirmed that no inappropriate shots were fired, so no one was hurt. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any casualties—it might’ve basically killed the program says Fahey: “Once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again.” On the upside, it means we have another 10 to 20 years before they rise and go to war with us.”
Well, that’s relief.
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It’s the fiftieth anniversary of LEGO Group founder Ole Kirk Christiansen’s patenting of the now-iconic brick. This year is also the 30th anniversary of the minifig and 10th anniversary of LEGO MINDSTORMS.
(The company has actually been putting out toys since the ’40s but only settled on the perfect brick architecture in 1958.)
Who can doubt the huge impact of LEGO? The bricks have been used to create 3D printers, autopilots and buckyballs. Architects concept with LEGO bricks. It has inspired museum-quality works of art as well as more humble ones. There are an average of 62 legos per inhabitant of the Earth, with 2,400 different kinds of bricks in 53 colors. There are 55,600 LEGO videos on YouTube and over 170,000 pictures on Flickr.
To commemorate the anniversary, the LEGO Group is holding a series of building challenges around the world to determine the best builder in each country between the ages of 6 and 13. The finalists will be invited to Denmark to participate in a huge building bonanza. Details will be revealed in March on www.LEGO.com/Club.
Happy Birthday, Legos!
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Scientists in Switzerland have created learning robots that can lie to each other about food sources.
The team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Federal Institute of Technology created the little experimental learning devices to work in groups and hunt for “food” targets nearby while avoiding “poison.” Imagine their surprise when one generation of robots learned to signal lies about the poison, sending opponents to their doom.
The little wheeled robots had neural circuitry with about 30 “genes” that determine their behavior, and how much they react to light in the environment. The food sources charged up the robots’ batteries while the poison drained them, and by using the genes of the most successful feeders in 50 successive generations, the team was hoping to select the fittest.
Three colonies of bots in the 50th generation learned to signal to other robots in the group when then found food or poison. But the fourth colony included lying cheats that signaled food when they found poison and then calmly rolled over to the real food while other robots went to their battery-death. Eerily wicked, to say the least. Saving the robots’ honor, luckily, there were also a few “hero robots” that signaled danger and then rolled to their death to save the others.
Will this culture make it into consumer robots? Imagine the possibilities. Security systems lying about whether or not kids snuck out in the middle of the night…
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