Joules The Robotic Cyclist

If you've followed the blog for a while you'll know that I have a thing for robots, and I'm a pretty big Google fanboy but that's another story. Thanks to Gizmodo for bringing my attention to Joules. According to Greyhair100's Youtube page "Joules the Robot sits on the back of a tandem bicycle and does the pedaling for both of us"

Did you recognize the song in the background? Robots and Daisy... perhaps Joules is a descendant of Hal 9000 or vice versa?

This Resonates With Me Like A Good Dilbert Cartoon

Thanks to Geeks are Sexy for this find! It sort of speaks to me the way Scott Adams does with his Dilbert character. I'm not sure why...

MIT Students Capture Photos From Space - Budget $160.00

Three MIT students, Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee and Eric Newton, used common consumer electronics and a weather balloon to snap pictures from space. Dubbed Project Icarus the three who specialize in taking low-cost aerial photographs that they display and sell through a website called 1337arts, captured the photograph below from 28 kilometres up.

"The camera used in the project was a 7.1-megapixel Canon Powershot the students bought used on Amazon.com. They installed an open-source firmware add-on to the camera that would allow them to program it to take a picture every five seconds.

To track the location of the balloon, they used a $50 pre-paid Motorola cellphone with GPS capabilities and installed a free program that would report the phone's location at regular intervals. A USB phone charger powered by AA lithium batteries kept the phone running during the five-hour voyage. They also installed an external antenna to boost the phone's signal"

Perhaps NASA should hire a few more MIT grads!



Source: CBC

Google Throws News Sites A Life Line

The Official Google Blog has announced the latest creation from Google Labs called Fast Flip. "Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting." My limited trial of the service leads me to believe that it is delivering on this promise, the page loads quickly allowing you to peruse the articles and then drill down on the ones you want to read. There is also a mobile version for Android-powered devices and iPhones.

At the moment Google has partnered with "three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek." The number would seem like a lot but you can flip through these articles in a hurry so it will be nice to see who else comes on board down the road. All in all I think I'll be giving Fast Flip a go, it will definitely be on my list of sources to check each morning.

Segway Inventor Wants To Cleanup The Worlds Drinking Water

Dean Kamen the inventor most famous for bringing us the Segway has created a new device called the Slingshot which turns contaminated water into pure drinking water. The device is smaller and more energy efficient than other purifiers and can produce about 200 gallons per day. Kamen hopes to find funding partners and distributors to help keep the cost of distribution down and see his device in wide use. "In your lifetime, my lifetime, we will see water be a really scarce, valuable commodity," Kamen says.

Posthumous Apology For Alan Turing

Alan Turing was a mathematical genius and some would consider him a war hero for his cracking of the German Enigma machines in World War II, allowing the allies to decipher encrypted messages sent by the enemy. Turing also made significant contributions to the advancement of artificial intelligence and is well known in the field of AI for the test he envisioned would determine whether or not a machine was intelligent, The Turing Test. Unfortunately for Turing, he was also a gay man in a time when there was no acceptance for the sexual preference. Turing was imprisoned for his sexual orientation and would later take his own life.

Yesterday British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized for his country's treatment of Turing saying "While Mr Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him."

The apology came after an online campaign, the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming and backed by Ian McEwan, scientist Richard Dawkins and gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

Source: BBC

Jobs Returns To The Stage At Apple

“I’m vertical, I’m back at Apple and I’m loving every day of it,” said Steve Jobs after a standing ovation by the crowd gathered at the Apple news conference held yesterday. “I feel great. I probably need to gain about 30 pounds, but I feel really good,” said Jobs in a post event interview “I’m eating like crazy. A lot of ice cream.”

During the conference Apple announced a new version of iTunes and a line of iPod Nanos that have a video camera, microphone, speaker, FM radio tuner and pedometer built in and will have a starting price of $149 US. The new features are meant to rejuvenate the slumping sales of iPods and take a bite out of the market for small video devices such as the Flip Video. The new Nano is compared in size to a package of gum while the Flip is roughly the size of a deck of playing cards.

Source: New York Times

Twitter User Celebrates 104th Birthday

Ivy Bean of Bradford, near Leeds, is an active twitter user with 27,000 followers. She tweets about the highs and lows of her life like many of the rest of us, only Ivy is 104 years old and is believed to be the oldest active Twitter user. Ms Bean tweets from the care home where she lives, Hillside Manor, "We're trying to do something different than knitting or crochet," says Pat Wright, the home's manager.

Before Twitter, Ivy was an active Facebook user, where she had maxed out her 5,000-friend limit.

Source: CNN

9-9-09 Preview Beatles: Rock Band

In this G4 tv's XPlay video Blair Herter talks to John Drake from Harmonix about the upcoming 'Beatles: Rock Band,' On sale tomorrow 09-09-09! Can't wait...

Video Game - E3 2009 - X-Play

Space Junk Explained

With the recent near miss, within a mile, of the International Space Station (ISS) by a large piece of space junk I decided to do a little searching regarding how much junk is out there and how dangerous it is to orbiting craft. The Science Channel produced a short video of the subject that does a good job of explaining. Check it out here: http://science.discovery.com/videos/spaced-out-space-junk.html