Suidobashi Heavy Industry of Japan has finally found a way to make (a) work or (b) laser tag interesting to me; put me inside a giant robot. But to get the "Kuratas mecha" you will have to spend $1.35 million. You will want to, because they have a polite, hot Japanese girl in shorts in their video. Its diesel engine sends it at an elegant 10 KPH clip, basically a decent walking...
read moreCrotchety old men seem to have won this argument.Modern pop music is too loud and does sound all the same, just like angry old types have been saying for 70 years. A team from Spain analyzed music from a 55 year period, using an archive known as the Million Song Dataset, and found that songs have indeed become both louder and more homogenized in terms of chords and melodies. read...
read moreIt feels odd to write about Microsoft Office. I am not an expert – because I don’t use it. I use editors, they just don’t cost $200 or whatever MS Office costs. Science 2.0 has a great editor, thankyouverymuch. This site has a WordPress editor. An XP desktop machine I use for programming has OpenOffice, for when someone sends me a Word document. I use Google Documents and...
read moreAre we on the road to uploading our brains to computers and living forever? Singularity proponents require a two-pronged approach to believing so; wildly overstating the technology curve of what future computers and programmers will accomplish and wildly understating the complexity of the human brain. If you believe strongly enough, the future looks bright for an...
read moreSince "The Avengers" is a giant movie this year, when you think of something that shoots lightning, you might think of Thor. If so, perhaps your clever joke would be "Can we name that Laser-Induced Plasma Channel "Mjolnir"?If you're old like me, "Star Trek" will be more your thing and "Set your phasers to fry" will be more your speed.(1) read...
read moreIs it possible to lose at Rochambeau, the millenia-old game of Rock, Paper, Sissors, every single time?It shouldn't be but a new Janken robot (Janken is the Japanese name for Rock, Paper, Scissors - why is the West stuck with a French name for an ancient Egyptian game? It's a mystery of linguistics) can win against humans without fail. Is it psychic? Are humans that predictable?...
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