Isotropic is …
... my personal blog.
Unless otherwise indicated, anything I write here is simply my personal, probably ill-formed, opinion and does not represent the views, beliefs, positions, or opinions of any other person or entity.
Monthly Archives: March 2008
31 Mar 2008
Tiny Terminators
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 robot [...]
25 Mar 2008
Department of Notification
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 on the [...]
23 Mar 2008
Core Dump
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 [...]
22 Mar 2008
Cyborg Insects
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, [...]
22 Mar 2008
BigDog Quadruped Robot
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. [...]
17 Mar 2008
Gnome Killer
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. [...]
15 Mar 2008
Think of the Children
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 [...]
13 Mar 2008
Swarming Robots
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 [...]
