Robots are cool and while many of them that we talk about here are more for fun for a geek, there are many uses for robots that have nothing to do with fun. We

Shared by Daniel thx kf

Shared by Daniel To any adults who haven’t spent time watching Yo Gabba Gabba, one constant theme is living with robot friends and how they feel inside. In the show this is used to talk about how all the characters (and by extension their young audience) feel inside, but the fundamental assumption that robots feel is presented without even the whiff of contradiction.

Shared by Daniel thx Kehan Test your strategy against the computer in this rock-paper-scissors game illustrating basic artificial intelligence.

Shared by Daniel oh my Perhaps you thought the four-legged BigDog robot wasn’t eerily lifelike enough. That’ll change soon. BigDog’s makers are working on a new quadruped that

How recent events have changed the nature of the “Information wants to be free” debate

Again in the D&D revolution thread: I’m not sure if you explicitly know this, but you are basically giving a rough definition of ‘media’ in the technical sense of the term. It is important that ‘new media’ is understood as a genuinely new medium of communication, and how rare and wonderful the creation of a new medium is. You are being too generous with your ‘phases’; the printed word is basically identical to the broadcasted word in the technical sense of ‘media’, the only difference is in scope and scale. So it is important to recognize that new media is not just a change in scope and scale, it is a change in medium itself. The classic media studies analysis of this uses the analogy of transportation. The analogy isn’t perfect, but it does have the virtue of distinguishing between “mode of transportation” and “vehicle of transportation”. All the talk of ‘speed’ and ‘audience’ is about the vehicle, not the medium. Here’s how the analogy works: For the vast, vast majority of our existence as a species, the only areas we could travel to were over land. We can improve the speed and scale of land-based travel through various technological innovations- the wheel, the paved road- but they are still taking us to and from the same places. Then a breakthrough emerges: we build boats. Suddenly, we have a new avenue of travel previously off limits. In some cases it allows faster travel between distant lands, but sometimes this travel might be slower. The difference, though, is not simply a difference of speed, it is a difference of medium: we are traveling through avenues that were previously inaccessible. As a result, we opened up new destinations that we could have never reached by land-based travel alone, such as islands scattered […]

A couple weeks ago, I was listening to a story by NPR’s Planet Money team about “Toxie” a toxic asset they had purchased to follow and help tell the story of the recent financial meltdown. One of the mortgages in Toxie was on a home bought for investment in Bradenton, Florida, and the team took a look at housing in the area. Many homes there are empty and have been for years. Huge developments sit partially completed among densely built up neighborhoods and swampland. A guest stated that there were “enough housing lots in Charlotte County to last for more than 100 years”. Boom and bust residential development has drastically affected parts of southwest Florida for decades now, and I spent some time (with the help of Google Earth), looking around the area. With permission from the fine folks at Google, here are a few glimpses at development in southwest Florida.

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