It’s awards season again! Well, it isn’t really, but the point is that while others may cover the Oscars, the Baftas and of course, the Junior princess all-star frisbee throw off, Electric Spectre maintains it’s reputation as the planet’s best source for the news that counts by bringing you: The Robot Hall of Fame Awards!
To be honest, I didn’t have a bloody clue there even was such a thing, but Engadget have helpfully filled in the blanks in my CPU and informed me of this week’s event in that hub of technological progress-Pittsburgh.
Now, terrifying mecha-beast the Da Vinci Surgical System and Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity were inducted, and rightly so, but apparently so were Huey, Dewey and Louis from 70s Disney space-gonk fest ‘Silent Running’ (oohh ooohh George Lucas liked it a bit you know? ooooh that’s exciting, it must be AMAZING!!!! Ooooh oooh, I just spurted oil in my electric robot sex pants), and the T-800. Yes, the one in the picture above. The fact that Terminators aren’t like…real or anything obviously not deterring voters-ES would like to nominate Unicron for next year’s awards.
Here’s hoping that ‘Salvation‘ will be less of a waste of time than this.
LINK(Engadget)
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Draculas. We hates ‘em. They come in your house at night, sliding down the chimney, before making off with your opera hat and white gloves. Sometimes they even sneak into your neighbours house and brutally mutilate his teenage daughter. Yep, they’re a right pest to be sure. but worry no more gentle house-dweller, because science, the age-old nemesis of el Wamphiri , has put a stop to their tricks. By proving they don’t exist!
Top coffin boffins used advanced sums and adding up to prove that if there was one neck-sucker around in 1600AD, then we’d all be wearing sunblock by 1602AD at the latest, thanks to the inescapable laws of geometric progression. Physicists Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi’s paper “Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality” states:
“Another philosophical principal related to our argument is the truism given the elaborate title, the anthropic principle. This states that if something is necessary for human existence, then it must be true since we do exist. In the present case, the nonexistence of vampires is necessary for human existence. Apparently, whomever devised the vampire legend had failed his college algebra and philosophy courses.”
Oh, those wacky, tax-funded physicists. Basically what they are saying is, if you get one vampire, then he’d have us all gobbling each other up pretty sharpish, thus preventing both the invention of sliced bread, and the need for goths. So, swings and roundabouts then. ElectricSpectre have taken a vote, and we’ve decided that this is fine, but we are more worried about the wolfman.
LINK (i09)
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One of the good things about living on blog mountain is that you get access to all the latest technology early, and can wander around Shoreditch with it, looking like a proper spacker. So it was with gasps of glee we greeted the arrival of Lenovo’s new netbook, a leather-clad Vaio P alternative. The blogosphere was soon awash with gushing techjizz, as it was revealed that not only would it not be made by Sony (So lending it kudos not seen since we all got those huge blocky Zen Mp3 players instead of iPods), but you could remove the keyboard, and roll the little fella up to fit in your pocket, snugly fitting like the chunky wallet of Steve Jobs.
Unfortunately, this turns out to be…a load of old bollocks.
“Lies! All damned lies!!” we shouted through the web.
“It’s a prototype!” screamed the coniving rat-bastards at Lenovo.
Although apparently ‘Prototype’ these days means ‘thinking of something and perhaps building a cardboard model of it’. I myself have therefore decided to join this new trend in emergant technologies, by inventing a paper cup..that lets you time travel..into the minds of the world’s sexiest woman..and have sex ..uhh..with yourself..in space..or something…
LINK (Techmeon)
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Look how little it is! Who would fly it? Stuart Little perhaps, using his tiny freakish human-hands to skilfully pilot it, in stealth mode, through your window at night, before setting down on your chest and stealing your soul. That’s what Stuart Little does. Anyway, look how tiny it is! Brilliant!.
Link (Think Geek)
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Another week, another crazy DARPA-based story on ES, this time relating to the holy grail of military industrialist govrments everywhere- Mind Control!
The latest from our favourite mad science mavericks is known as Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery (REPAIR), and is actually being billed as ‘mind repair’, basically amounting to attempts to harness the power of the mind- what the boys in the lab bill as “Understanding how nueral-based sensory stimulation can accelerate recovery from brain injury.”
Sounds good doesn’t it? Until you realise that it involves building a complex nueral model (That’ll be A.I to you and me)and sticking it in a simulated environment (That’ll be The Matrix). Once this is done, it’s a short step to plugging in actual brains. And ’stimulating’ them to produce responses – any response you want in fact.
So- an advanced military think-tank, with the ability to make you think and do whatever it wants (and a living computer adding extra spice to the whole thing) is coming soon. Unless of course…they’ve already done it. Follow the white rabbit…
LINK (Buzzup)
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