CoinOpVideogames.com has a large assortment of live audio recorded at arcades from the period of 1982-1988. The sound quality is what you would expect from a couple of kids in an arcade with a cassette recorder but it’s charming nonetheless.
It’s a fairly comprehensive collection and very impressive considering that while most kids were busy wasting their allowance without any future benefits, two young friends had the forethought to meticulously preserve the audio from almost every game of the era.
Sclerochronologists1 from The University of Bangor (Wales) dredged a 405-410 year old clam out of the ocean near Iceland in 2006. The creature, a quahog clam, Arctica islandica beat the previous record of 374 years also held by an Artica.
It is believed that the clam would have lived even longer had it not been dredged out of the ocean by scientists seeking long-lived animals.
CNN ran an article about a recent auction of meteorites including a 30lb hunk of the Willamette Meteorite which is the largest recovered meteorite to have hit North America. The auction comprised 50 well-documented specimens and had bids that ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars (those bids were canceled when they fell short of some 7-figure estimated values).
Scientific and historical value aside, according to CNN, the most interesting items for sale included a mailbox that had been struck by a meteorite (it went for nearly $83,000) and a meteorite whose claim to fame is that it caused the only known, recorded fatality (mass-extinction events excluded).
CNN’s headline to this high-profile, important auction? “Cow-killing meteorite sells for $1,554″ That’s good stuff.
The killer space rock, known as the “Valera” fell in Venezuela in 1972 and killed a cow. Compared to the mailbox price it really says terrible things about the value of a cow’s life. At least that death was not in vain, CNN was able to use it to disguise a science article in a way to make it interesting to the common folk.
Oh, here’s a shot of that mailbox:
Oh, and back to the Willamette Meteorite… that meteorite has been the source of controversy due a claim by The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde who say that the main 15.5 ton mass is a sacred object sent to Earth by some Sky People that they believe in. (The meteorite has been permanently housed at The American Museum of Natural History in New York City since 1908).
Mowgli is a robot being developed by The School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo and the Intelligent Systems Research Institute (AIST) in Japan. This interesting “frogbot” (if you will) uses a pneumatic muscular system to make incredibly smooth jumps and landings. See for yourself:
Robops’ company website has a strange look and feel. Rather than learning about robotic pigeon-terrorizing systems, it seems more like you are reading a mystery novel. Check it out: Robops.co.uk
Boston Dynamics, maker of “BigDog” (aka the Robot Mule), has a prototype of an exploration robot that they call “Little Dog.” Check out the video:
The same company is also working on a bug-like climbing robot called Rise:
Ryomei Engineering Co., Ltd, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. develops a variety of engineering and environmental control machinery and, in their spare time develop robot fish. Check out their robotic koi:
Stanford is working on a line of roach-inspired locomotion systems called Sprawl Robots” . Their website hasn’t been updated since 2006 but they did note that they last had a Sprawl running at 15 body-lengths a second!
This isn’t an animal but it is the undercarriage of a JPL Mars Rover platform…and in this video it is driving over XEAI regular Miss Jennifer!
I was digging around the forums for posts on robot animals and I found that we’ve had quite a few. After all, who can resist the winning combination of machines that move, look, even eat in rudimentary facsimile to their inexpensive, fully functional counterparts?
Let’s visit the Robot Menagerie!
Necoro (left) is a freaky looking robot cat from Japan. It looks like it’s programmed to kill you then assume control of your appliances and await further instruction.
Also on the creepy side are a variety of insect-powered robots that literally eat bugs for power. This is obviously an early scale test for giant, backhoe-sized robots that will certainly be powered by human meat.
Behold, SlugBot! He isn’t much to look at but he can track down, capture, and eat slugs!! According to the research website, SlugBot can also eat sausages which vaguely resemble slugs.
Visit the SlugBot home page. It hasn’t been updated since 2001 when SlugBot went berserk and ate the researchers.
The University of South Florida is also in on the robots-that-eat craze and have introduced us to the term “gastrobot.” They even scored themselves gastrobots.com where you can learn about Chew-Chew the cute little train that eats sugar cubes. Eating sugar cubes is cute! It’s not scary like eating slugs! I’m guessing they chose sugar cubes because no one would question the development of such a cute robot… awwww it eats sugar cubes!!! Of course it isn’t a big leap to go from sugar cubes to human meat. Chew-Chew doesn’t look too cute either. Despite the kid-friendly colors and the wagons, there is something sinister about that collection of tubes and processing equipment.
For vegan roboticists, here is a related and interesting article about a solid state “spinach sandwich” power chip that may someday power our mobile devices: http://www.physorg.com/news1181.html
The Boston Dynamics BigDog (aka Robot Mule) is really an engineering marvel. They have a four-legged walking robot that has an uncanny, realistic gait. Watch as catches itself from falling!!
Everyone’s heard of AIBO (and if not, you’ve already missed the party). Sony, if only you hadn’t squandered your money on the overpriced and overly complicated PS3…you wouldn’t have had to cancel AIBO!!!! I do have one question: What was with the evil, Terminator AIBO model?
Because Sony abandoned AIBO, the Robocup Soccer Initiative has had to switch from cute robo-dogs to less cute, bipedal robots.
Anyway, back to robot animals. I recently saw Salamandra Robotica (Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne) at the Wired Nextfest. I took some video of the little critter in action:
At Stanford University, scientists are working on a gecko robot that can climb walls. Stickybot uses tiny polymer threads and the principles van der Waals force (intermolecular attraction) to climb up flat surfaces.
NASA is working on Snakebot to explore and to do some digging in space. Engineers are obviously coming up with these names. (No offense engineers, you know it’s true) This is a good quote from one of the developers:
A snakebot is not as good at some jobs as other robots, but you get a lot more robot for the weight and the money…
Snakebot will apparently be sold by the pound (or by the kilo in the metricness of space).
Carnegie Mellon University is working on their own snakebots with names like “Breadstick” and “Pepperoni.” Their snakebots are being developed for emergency rescue operations and in off hours, drain snaking.
New government study released: Depression among Adults Employed Full-Time, by Occupational Category
The highest rates of past year MDE among female full-time workers aged 18 to 64 were found in the food preparation and serving related occupations (14.8 percent), and the highest rates among male full-time workers aged 18 to 64 were found in the arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations (6.7 percent)
I used to think that work was depressing but now, with this study, I can prove it!
I have been doing offsite system back ups at a safe deposit box for years…and it sucks a lot. First, I never have time to go during banking hours. Second, even with double-density DVD-ROMs I never get around to backing up as much data as I should. Lately, I haven’t been doing much of anything except talking about offsite back up.
Anyway, a friend referred me to Mozy which gives you unlimited system backups for like $50/year…and if you don’t feel like paying you can get 2GB of back up for free. (The backup is incremental so you aren’t bogged down doing upload all the time.)
Day 1: Free Sign Up. Trip to safe deposit box postponed.
I signed up for it…backing up 108GB automatically…better than burning disks and never taking them to the safe deposit box.
Day 2: The back ups begin!
I have it set to back up every 3 days. The big thing is your upload speed plus the amount you are backing up… The former needs to be fast! So far, I’m a believer but I just started with the full system plan last night.
Day 5: Still backing up…
Slowly upppplooooaaadddddinnnngggg…. My upload speed is about 400kps I am starting to wonder if it is a kilobit
Of course this is a function of my connection rather than the back up system. I had been happily backing up 2GB for the past 6 weeks or so but now I am pushing 108GB.
Day 20: Fourth Try is a Winner!
I had a couple of false starts because I tried to back up EVERYTHING at once… over 100 GB. I also didn’t notice that I had my upload speed set to cut back during the day. I spent a two weeks uploading then Microsoft did an unhelpful auto-update + reboot which screwed up the data xfer!
Since my maiden backup was interrupted and didn’t complete, Mozy didn’t remember any of the stuff I uploaded. Once you’ve backed up your files, Mozy does incremental backups.
After bottling my frustration…I try again.
Basically on the first upload you need to establish “checkpoints” by having successful uploads. You can do this by backing up in smaller increments. There wasn’t any documentation on this– just my trial and error. Now I am backing up in 5 – 10 GB increments by adding a few directories after each successful upload.
Now that I have figured it out, I am very happy! Granted, it took me a few tries to figure it out…but it is all good now. You can learn from my experience…it will be more than you learn from Mozy’s site. If you want to try it out, you get 2GB free and you don’t have to give a credit card or anything. If interested, click the link below to sign up:
CoinOpVideogames.com has a large assortment of live audio recorded at arcades from the period of 1982-1988. The sound quality is what you would expect from a couple of kids in an arcade with a cassette recorder but it’s charming nonetheless.
Sclerochronologists1 from The University of Bangor (Wales) dredged a 405-410 year old clam out of the ocean near Iceland in 2006. The creature, a quahog clam, Arctica islandica beat the previous record of 374 years also held by an Artica.
Once you’ve backed up your files, Mozy does incremental backups.
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