A brief scan of the intertubes shows that I’m pretty much the last person to see this, but just in case you haven’t seen it either here’s footage of Petman, a walking robot prototype from Boston Dynamics [via grinding.be, and loads of other places]:
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking; we don’t even have robots smart enough to fetch our breakfast yet, but already they’ve designed one with the ability to sweat. I can’t help but feel there’s something deeply and disappointingly wrong with this development curve.
The results showed that the appropriately trained sexologists were able to correctly infer vaginal orgasm through watching the way the women walked over 80 percent of the time. Further analysis revealed that the sum of stride length and vertebral rotation was greater for the vaginally orgasmic women. “This could reflect the free, unblocked energetic flow from the legs through the pelvis to the spine,” the authors note.
…these gigantic black holes, which accumulate mass by sucking in matter from neighboring gas, dust and stars, seem unable to grow beyond this limit regardless of where – and when – they appear in the universe.
This may affect some of the long term predictions of the future of the universe, as expounded in Stephen Baxter’s Deep Future, which is well worth a read.
The robot has a certain ‘AT-AT’ quality, doesn’t it? It’s amazing how creepily lifelike its movements are. If you had to trek across the desert or Antarctic, would you like a ‘Big Dog’ around carrying your gear?
NEW FICTION: TUPAC SHAKUR AND THE END OF THE WORLD by Sandra McDonald: I have a portable radio and extra batteries but it’s too depressing to listen to what’s left of local newscasts. It doesn’t matter, anymore, what burns or blows up or falls into the sea. What matters is finding a cure to the Creep. Which isn’t going to happen, unless somewhere there’s a
