Behold the potential future of building; construction workers, you may want to start training for your second career NOW.
Oh, so you’re not impressed by that? OK, so imagine large swarms of smaller versions of those quadrotor critters assembling constructions which themselves are autonomous, modular, quasi-sentient and self-repairing…
From BotJunkie, via George Dvorsky; cheers, George. 🙂
Personal Information is a new serial sci-fi webcomic from Sarah “Does Not Equal” Ennals.
Did you enjoy that planetary impact simulator I linked to a while back? Did you enjoy it, perhaps, a little too much, and feel that your galactic karma could do with a bit of balancing? Well, what better way to atone for smashing planets to bits than by building new ones, which is exactly what NASA’s Planet Makeover webapp lets you do [via BoingBoing]. A bit of random fun for friday afternoon: adjust planet size, orbital distance, solar type and planetary age, then hit the button and see whether you’ve made a habitable world. [SPOILERS: your odds of doing so are very low. Good afternoon, Professor Drake!]
Not a new idea, of course (I had a serious hankering for a copy of SimEarth back at the start of the nineties, but never got one), but NASA have wisely brought the idea kicking and screaming into the Twentyteens by a) simplifying it and putting it on the web for free and b) using the word EXTREME! in the name.
Remember me mentioning IBM’s Watson, the artificial intelligence system trained to play – and kick meatperson arse – at Jeopardy? Watson’s big showdown with the top-rated Jeopardy players is scheduled for next month, but a practice run for a press conference yesterday saw Big Blue’s big box beat the humans by a reasonable lead. I wonder what the bookies’ odds are on a complete victory?
Reports that Watson, at this crucial breakthrough juncture in its career, has been invited to appear in this summer’s run of Oh My God I’m a Marginal Celebrity Survivor With Talent On Ice In the Jungle Get Me An Agent are said to be unfounded, and were in fact made up by me a few seconds ago.
This is not an android copy of Philip K Dick; it’s an android copy of an android copy that mysteriously went missing from an aircraft cargo manifest in 2006, which strikes me as just the sort of weird occurance the man himself would have started a story from.