These are things that are dear to me:
Thus, I want to share the coolest hexapod robot I’ve ever seen:
It can draw pictures! With a pen!
And carve faces in 3-D! with a router head!!
If you know of a cooler hexapod robot, I need to know immediately.
More about this robot and it’s creator, Matt Denton, at micromagic systems and his robotics forum.
I’m going to try Goodreads’ book review embedding feature… so here goes.
My review
rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book was a major slog to get through, but I can’t deny that the main character, Oscar, the hunchback midget, is hard to get out of my head. Some of the prose was poetic enough to stick in my head as well (“The bookshelves laughed themselves into splinters…” as they were hit by bullets, and stuff like that.)
Starting in, I had the impression that this book was sort of a analysis of the psychosis of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but I didn’t really get anything like that out of it. I felt if anything it skated, if not glossed over, that subject. As for Grass being the “guilty conscience” of Germany, I have to call BS on that as well. That certainly didn’t come through in this book, and it turns out Grass hid the fact that he was in the Waffen SS for 60 years. Sorry, I can’t just go with, wow, it was all insane! And, see, the characters in this book are all insane–that’s the only way to understand the Nazi phenomenon: by putting yourself in the insane POV! Uh, no, not buying it.
That being said, the book has some memorable scenes, grotesque characters and settings (even some gross sex scenes), and it makes you squirm pretty good sometimes. It Reminds me a lot “Geek Love” by Katherine Dunn — except cross-pollinated with a little Kafka, and much longer. Too much longer. The Tin Drum could have been edited in half, at least.
Why this book won the Pulitzer I have no idea. Perhaps, I just don’t understand what makes great literature.
Robots and kids: two things that just naturally go together. There’s nothing cuter than a boy and his dog, except maybe a boy and his robot. There’s The Iron Giant, Luke and R2D2 in Star Wars, Artificial Intelligence: A.I., The Terminator… the list stretches on.
That’s why I was surprised I had no luck in recruiting any of my dad friends to come with Wyatt and me to see the 2008 RoboGames at Fort Mason Center last weekend. RoboGames is a massive robot competition with the star attraction being robot fights. These are the kind of robot battles you may have seen on TV, in which the robots attack each other with pneumatic hammers, saw blades, flame throwers, and other weapons inside a bullet-proof glass arena. There were many other competitions, including bipod races and Robot Sumo, lots of vendors showing their robot wares and robot enthusiasts exhibiting various robot projects.
One dad said to me, “[I don't want to take my kid because] then I’d have to explain to him why the robots are fighting.” I find this baffling. What’s to explain? It’s like Wyatt says, “All robots do is walk, walk, walk, walk and fight.” Different parenting styles I guess.
I managed to get some good photos and videos. We were too busy watching the fights to take many pictures of that aspect of the show, but there’s good links to videos of the fights and stuff on BotJunkie.
witter
| www.flickr.com |
