As I make arrangements to close down things in the lab and prepare for a bit of turkey and ham, I thought I’d put up some of my favourite blog posts from the last year:
- Top of the list is ‘s “The Industrial Ecosystem“. A lovely thought experiment and a very satisfying answer.
- For my friend Niall, “Resilience or Why there are so many of us“. The most memorable TED quote you’re likely to come across.
- Paul Graham writes many great essays, but I particularly enjoyed this one called Cities and Ambition. To understand why Paul’s answer is so good, compare Paul Kedrosky’s piece on the same topic.
Finally, for a bit of fun, check out the Austrian Hexapod Dance Competition:
I will look through those selected posts.
Some of the dancing hexapods are very amusing.
I thought this might interest you:
Vehicle-safety systems
Stopping in a hurry
Dec 11th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Cars are getting better at avoiding collisions. Before long they may be communicating with each other to make roads safer
Smart Robot Capable of Hunting For Its Own “Food”
By Soulskill on note-to-robots-i-am-not-food
coondoggie writes “Ok, maybe this is getting a little too close to bringing Terminator-like robots to life. For starters, eco-friendly engine builder Cyclone Power this week inked a contract from Robotic Technologies, Inc. (RTI) to develop what it calls a beta biomass engine system that will be the heart of RTI’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR). The purpose of EATR is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling — in other words it needs to ‘eat.’ According to researchers, the EATR system gets its energy by foraging, or what the firms describe as ‘engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable.'” We can only hope they don’t team up with the Multi-Robot Pursuit System project to “search for and detect a non-cooperative human.”
You’ve probably seen this:
Missile defense multiple kill vehicle hover test
Hey Milan – I hadn’t seen any of those! I’ve been away in Australia giving a lecture. Thanks for the links. The missile defense one is rather interesting!
What was your lecture about?
Our own little message board, right here.
My PhD basically. Recognising places from photographs. Very soon the talk should be up on videolectures.net, so I’ll post about it then.
Getting and maintaining commenters takes absurd amounts of effort. If I miss even a single day of posting, traffic drops of dramatically the next day.
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