Isotropic

A post on ScienceDaily says “Salmonella bacteria can be turned into tiny terminator robots that venture deep into cancerous tumors where conventional chemotherapy can’t reach.”
No, I don’t have a thing for robots, it’s just coincidental that robot-related items have caught my attention lately, and they make for easy posts. I guess the next [...]

Unfortunately, my hosting provider, DreamHost, is having some issues. Thus, this site has been extremely slow, sometimes entirely down, for the last week. It’s unclear just when this will be resolved. Because this is only a personal blog, I’ll try to weather the storm — it’s too much hassle to change hosts [...]

A small guest at the office.

I often open junk snail mail just to see how bizarre it can be. Although this one was rather mundane, I was amused by the “Department of Notification” seal appearing as a faint background on the front of the sheet, and again (see the scan at left) in each of the four corners [...]

Jeff Moser, in Computing History Matters, said ‘I had always assumed that the “core” referred to in the error message was an adjective for “main,” but when I saw real “core memory,” I realized that I had misunderstood the term for years.’ It’s an interesting overview; you should check it out.
However, that particular comment [...]

The goal is to create insects that can be remotely controlled to serve as remote sensing devices, giving the paranoid schizophrenic in us all one more excuse to start gibbering about “Project: Beelzebub.”
–Joel Johnson, Cyborg Moths Will Soon Watch You Pee, at Boing Boing Gadgets
Urm, yet another DARPA project.
Not that I’m paranoid, but imagine [...]

BigDog is a quadruped robot being developed by Boston Dynamics (funded by DARPA). You can read more about BigDog at Think Artificial.
BigDog’s behavior is fascinating, eerie, creepy — there’s a certain dissonance, knowing that it’s just a machine, yet its behavior induces that reptile-brain gut feeling that this is a living, very alien, creature. [...]

Eliezer Yudkowsky, in post Explaining vs. Explaining Away at Overcoming Bias, deconstructs a brief passage of Keat’s Lamia to point out that distinction. He concludes with
Bad scientist! No poems for you, gnomekiller!
Well, that’s how it feels, if you get emotionally attached to the gnomes, and then a scientist says there aren’t any gnomes. [...]

What these readers are effective at is conditioning kids to accept surveillance and routine searches and identity checks without particularized suspcion. … a small boy behind us chirped up, “No you have to be fingerprinted! Everybody has to be fingerprinted!”
–Cory Doctorow, Fingertip biometrics at Disney turnstiles: the Mouse does its bit for the police state, [...]

I want. Please send me a set, lol.
The main focus of this project is to investigate and develop novel principles of adaptation and evolution for symbiotic multi-robot organisms based on bio-inspired approaches and modern computing paradigms. Such robot organisms consist of super-large-scale swarms of robots, which can dock with each other and symbiotically share [...]