This is an interesting concept. I didn’t know Harvard had an Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, but it’s a great idea. Animals, insects specifically, are great at amazing feats of engineering, and now researchers there have developed robots that can work as a collective to build structures, in a similar vein to how ants or termites build theirs.

It may not sound like a big deal, but ant and termite mounds are wonders of the natural world. They are built without any plan, and by insects of course, but they have ventilation, heat re-direction, greenhouses, nurseries, and a complex series of non-random passageways. If one can’t function the building goes on without her and they often even sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony.

Honestly, all large structures are built the same way by humans, but they need a plan. If you watch the construction of any building there are numerous people crawling all over the place to get it done. Imagine if robots could be used instead to build complex structures.

These researchers didn’t provide the robots with a plan, rather they gave them a basic set of rules and the robots were able to build complex structures using only the rules that defined the end goal. It’s a difficult ting to explain, but the video below explains it in more detail and shows the robots moving blocks in to place. It’s surprisingly interesting to see.

Not that they would be used to replace humans, they would be used in situations where it would be dangerous for humans to be. As the article states, if structures needed to be built underwater or on the surface of another planet, these robots would be ideal.

You know what’s wrong with my garden? The lights don’t up and walk around on their own to give the garden a new look every once in a while.

Well, my problem has been solved! If I’m willing to do a little tinkering, I can get centrally controlled yet autonomous garden lights that are capable of monitoring their surroundings and relocating to different spots around the yard, either for a new look or to avoid people walking around.

The linked article indicates that the robots, that run $1,000, are actually just 4-legged robots. You can put anything you want on them; cameras, drinks, they could even come and g through a doggie-door.

I just want quadri-pedal garden lights that walk around on their own.

I’ve heard all types of derogatory terms in my years. Funny ones, not-funny ones, misused ones, ones that make it clear the person saying them has no idea what they really mean. Recently, a brand-new derogatory term has been making the rounds, and while I never agree with this kind of thing, I am at least willing to admit that I understand it.

The term is “Glasshole.”

It refers to someone who wears the new Google Glass headset in what can only be described as a socially inappropriate way. This could be anything, really. It could just be an air of smugness, or not paying attention to the world around you, or in what became an extreme case, wearing it to the type of bar where it clearly should not be worn. As a disclaimer, I am absolutely not justifying the result, here, but in my own personal opinion there was an obvious risk.

I’m seeing the term everywhere these days, even a linguistic evaluation of the evolution of the term. Mainly, these articles that use it are telling you how not to be one, which is good advice. I’m still not convinced of the applicability of Google Glass, but there will definitely be an adjustment period as it comes into social acceptance. I even found a blog post where the author came up with a whopping thirty-five arguments against Google Glass. Even I think that’s overkill, but it’s an interesting read and he makes valid points. Will it cause a surveillance state? Destroy what shreds of privacy we have left? These questions will have to be answered.

This kind of thing is not new when it comes to new technology. The most recent comparison is the Bluetooth dongle that people wear in their ear. When they first started becoming popular, I felt they made people look like smug jackasses (and I still do). They’re more accepted now, and similarlyGoogle Glass may become more accepted as time goes on, and may even be location specific; so if someone is wearing them in Silicon Valley, then no big deal. But if they’re trying to wear them around Sturgis, South Dakota, well, the outcome might be slightly different. Additionally, I think they have very real value in such arenas as the military and biotech where they would have actual application.

Be careful out there.

In a movie, but need to pee? Then you need to download the RunPee app. It will tell you the best time during your movie to run and pee so you miss as little as possible of the movie.

But plan ahead. When people use phones in movies, it can get ugly. Find out your best pee-time *before* you head into the theater!

This does seem excessive. I don’t know their justifications or rationale, but I question how valuable these images have turned out to be. There should at least be some mechanism in place for determining if the images have value and, if not, deleting them immediately.

And, as you could probably figure out, many of them are of an….intimate nature, and those were apparently being viewed by many people at the agency who didn’t need to view them. For things such as that between consenting adults, no one needs to view them other than the sender and recipient; I can’t imagine any of them are related to national security.

I’ll wait to hear their explanation as to the probative value of these captured images, but I suspect it is going to be difficult to explain away.

If it’s Thursday, go to Bing right now! If it’s not, click on the navigation arrows at the bottom of the Bing homepage until you see the image above. It’s a great animation.

To be fair to Google, their homepage is well done today also, celebrating John Steinbeck. It doesn’t beat their Pac-Man doodle, but it’s still pretty neat.

Prepare to be blown away. I hope you’re wearing shoes because this news bit is so astounding it will *literally* knock your socks off. They will fly, unaided, from your feet.

Here it is, are you ready?

Turns out, Americans would give up their TV service before they’d give up their Internet service. Anyone surprised? Anyone? No?

To be fair, people really love having their TV service. I have friends who are chomping at the bit for the next season of Game of Thrones to start, and I believe are paying for cable just so they can watch it. I have another friend who claims they wouldn’t be able to live if they couldn’t watch Judge Judy. Seriously.

The thing is, much of that is available if you have Internet service and a little patience. For example, you all know I’m a reluctant fan of The Walking Dead, and I am able to buy episodes through a (legit) video marketplace the day after they air for $3.00 per HD episode, or $2.00 for SD. So I pay $12.00 a month for that show as opposed to $131 I was paying for cable just to watch that one show. And you’d be surprised what can be found on YouTube.

Even the SuperBowl was streamed online this year for anyone who wanted to watch, cable subscription or not.

In fairness to people who love TV, some networks seem like they love being beholden to cable companies (by the way, one of the big issues with the Comcast / Time-Warner merger is that the new company will be able to extort higher carrier fees from content providers, meaning the networks, which will then be passed on to you) . HBO requires a cable service to watch their shows online, as does HGTV and many others, but if you’re patient many shows end up on DVD or Netflix or somewhere else in relatively short order.

It was an adjustment giving up my cable TV service, but I’m glad I did it. There’s a sense of freedom and independence that came with it, and apparently I’m not the only one who came to that conclusion. And that is not going unnoticed.

I should also mention this bizarre point made in the original article: “Pew noted spectacular growth in use of the Web, especially since 1995.” So, in other words, there has been spectacular growth in the single most revolutionary development since the introduction of the transistor, especially if we start counting from the day it was made available to the general public. Stop the presses!

Recently in class I mentioned I had seen the movie ‘Her,’ a story about a man who falls in love with his operating system. I wasn’t terribly excited about seeing it; I chalked it up to another take on the romantic comedy, a genre of film I find repellent. That’s why I was surprised at how good I thought it was, as it touched on issues of technology dependence and withdrawal, isolationism, loneliness in an increasingly connected yet decreasingly face-to-face world, plus it removed the issue of physical appearance, for both parties, from the equation. In fairness to the guy, the OS was voiced by Scarlett Johanssen. Give him a break!

A couple of you mentioned that you thought the whole thing was just too weird, that the very concept itself was unnerving. Well, prepare for it to get weirder and unnerving-er! In the same vein as that movie, Microsoft is readying what it refers to as a digital assistant to take on the offerings from Apple (Siri) and Google (Google Now). In the upcoming release of the Windows Phone 8.1 platform, Microsoft will be including Cortana, a personal assistant named after the eponymous AI from their Halo series, that will not just respond to queries, but will have some personality as well, including the way it bounces around the screen or presents a frown based on queries posed. That also means it won’t take on the female persona it had in the games, and I suspect for good reason – considering she’s digital, it was surprisingly difficult to find an appropriate header image for this post.

Cortana will also be replacing Bing search on the phones. That doesn’t mean Bing is gone, not by any means. Bing will still be one of the underlying search mechanisms that provides Cortana her (her? its?) results, along with Nokia’s HERE maps among others, and Apple’s Siri uses Bing as its underlying search mechanism as well.

But with these personal digital assistants developing more and more of a personality, both reactive and specific, we’re starting to enter what I suspect will become a challenging time, especially since we are already dealing with many, many, many people experiencing a removal from real-life as they accept digital versions instead.

The image above is a photo of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1964, taken from this link at space.com. As the article states, it was used for controlling unmanned space flights, and it has been designated an historical landmark and is still in use.

The reason I find this image particularly interesting is because the cel phone you have in your pocket or purse is infinitely more powerful than all the machinery you see here. To come up with specific numbers is meaningless, because the magnitudes are so significant.

To show how significant they are, I found some interesting comparisons at this link. The highlight is that they compared the Apollo moon landing craft – the spacecraft that took us to the MOON – to the very early IBM PC XT, the computer than ran Visicalc which we discussed in class, and started the computer revolution we are still experiencing today. A picture of it is below to give context.

Well, it turns out that the Apollo 11 spacecraft – the WHOLE spacecraft – had a whopping 2k of memory. That’s right, 2 kilobytes of memory. Some phones today have 2 *gigabytes* of RAM, although it’s not quite the same thing. The PC XT above had 16k, and it was only 10 years after the Apollo 11 mission.

The software, as the article goes on to state, was a different story. Incredibly advanced for its time, it used true multitasking along with a virtual machine (analogous to running a different system that uses a completely different language within the original system), and did it all with that limited amount of memory.

It’s no secret machines are as powerful as they are. Never mind spacecraft, it is a violation of federal law to ship an Xbox or Playstation game console to certain countries because their hardware is so powerful they could, theoretically, be used as a missile guidance system.

Additional note: I wanted to make a reference to the old Casio calculator watches that were popular in the 70’s and 80’s, specifically noting their allotted memory, if any, but no matter how hard I looked I could not find those specifications. I did however, find this article originally published in Time magazine in 1975, which contained the following sentence, and I assure you I am not making this up:

“The next development in watches, a few Christmases hence, will be the nuclear timepiece, powered by a radioactive cell that will last 50 years.”

Ponder that statement.

Those three words don’t make a lot of sense, but if you remember the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk I showed in class, then imagine it as a table, well suddenly the pieces all fall in to place, don’t they?

Why would you want one of these? Why would you want something from the 80’s / 90’s magnified and turned into a piece of living-room furniture? You’d want it for the most obvious reason of all:

Because. You. Can.

You can buy one here if you’re interested, and if you don’t mind their terrible web page, and if you can get their contact page to work, and if you don’t care that they’re hand-made in Germany with no price listed.