So, Segway's selling some new robot platform, which I'm sure will get press far beyond its merit, but who cares about that. The interesting part is the crazy wheels it uses: I hadn't heard of Mecanum wheels before, but they are nifty. This video of an electric wheelchair shows how it works pretty clearly: if all four wheels are turning in the same direction, it does the obvious thing. But if the wheels on one side are turning toward each other, and the wheels on the other side are turning away from each other, it moves sideways! The controller is neat, too: it looks to be a joystick that rotates.

As soon as possible, I'm going to have my pineal proboscis replaced with one of these:

Known as the CardioArm, the curved robot has a series of joints that automatically adjust to follow the course plotted by the robot's head. This provides greater precision than a flexible endoscope can offer. "It's certainly easier to control," says Robert Webster III, a professor at Vanderbilt University who works on flexible medical probes and was not involved in the CardioArm project.

The CardioArm is operated using a computer and a joystick. It has 102 degrees of freedom, three of which can be activated at once. This allows it to enter through a single point in the chest and wrap around the heart until it reaches the right spot to, say, remove problematic tissue. "The nice thing about [the] design is that each joint follows where you went in space.

Yellow Drum Machine Robot! The cuteness, it burns!

Notice how the robot first plays on the object it finds (or is forced to find by the angry cameraman), plays a small beat, and records the beat it plays on it. Then this recorded beat is played again, and it starts to play on the object (an belt tracks and everything else it has),and also playing this sampled beat :)

What it does? Basically:

• Navigate around, collect some data, avoid obstacles, until it

• Finds something "worth playing on" (a single isolated object or a wide flat surface that it can find an angle onto)

• Snakes into place

• Plays some beats on what it have found, and samples this, checking it has a "good sound"

• Based on data collected in the area, and sample just made, then compose a little rhythm, and plays this along with the sample

The navigation is complicated because it is not just a matter of navigating around obstacles - that was the easy part. Second the robot has to find good places to drum; A single, isolated object, or a flat wall. Then the robot has to place itself on a good angle to the wall, or straight infront of the object.. All with only L/R/F with the head ;) But it does it quite well now! I am usually amazed of what it finds to play on, when I just let it drive around.

Hello, my name is jwz and I am a pathetic fanboy. ("Hi jwz.")

Ok, I'm hesitant to say this, but the first three episodes of The Sarah Connor Chronicles have been pretty awesome, despite my strong expectations to the contrary. It could easily go steeply downhill from here (after all, the first 1¾ episodes of The Bionic Woman weren't bad either) but so far, it really has me hooked.

(Normally I expect the first two or three episodes of any TV series to suck, since usually the writers and actors haven't figured out what they're doing yet, and those episodes are chock full of exposition of the backstory, which always makes for terrible television. So it took me by surprise when BW started off ok and then immediately ratcheted up the suck.)

Anyway.

(Extremely minor spoilers:)

Sarah's character seems a lot less crazy and homicidal than she was in T2 just after she broke out of the asylum, but it is set four years later, so I can buy that maybe she mellowed a bit. John is still a whiny little bitch, but that's exactly like in the movie. I'm glad they seem to be setting up a long arc story and not the obvious "Terminator of the Week" plots. The River-800 is awesome, even though she's totally typecast now. I'm liking the half-Mulder-half-Scully FBI agent too ("Oh, didn't she tell you? It's because of the robots. The robots from the future.") The Oppenheimer stuff was great, and I enjoyed the shout-out to the Singularity.

And I really liked that they used time travel to delete the third movie in its entirety. That was a very, very, very good decision.

I expect to hate the high school subplot, but we'll see.

Here's a page with a decent breakdown of the timelines and timeline-revisions of the various Terminator movies: Terminator Wiki. It's not nearly as obsessively detailed as the Back to the Future timeline, which is surprising, but it lays it out pretty well. (Both of these would be easier to follow with a graphic; the BttF page used to have a chart, but it seems to have been deleted.)

Previously.

Update:

Robot Ascetic Inscribes Bible

Kuka, what appears to be a fairly standard industrial robot, has been reprogrammed to inscribe the entire Martin Luther bible onto a endless roll of paper. It uses a calligraphic style translated by its creators RobotLab from an early font called "Schwabacher."