New Scientist has a post today about a robotic rabbit with actual fur:
Yohanan’s new robot, dubbed the Haptic Creature, is designed to recreate that touch-based communication between pet and owner to inject an element of emotion into human-robot interactions.
Remember those stories from the Civil War about families fighting on both sides? How much harder will it be to unplug your robot pets when they turn on you?
Well, here’s the facts, Jack– the baseball season is one quarter of the way done. The Crew is in last place, 7.5 games behind the Cubs. If they’re going to live up to ANYONE’S expectations for this year, including their own, they’ve got their work cut out for them. One of the positive ways to spin their current plight is to note that Chicago was, at one point, 8.5 games behind the Brewers last year and won the division. The bad side of that point is that it would take a meltdown, of, well, Milwaukeean proportions for this thing to come together…
You figure 90 victories will still win the division. Nobody’s running away at this point to make that speculation any different. With their 118 remaining games, the Brewers would have to go 70-48. No small task. Another positive to take away is that out of these first 44 games, they’ve played 25 on the road. That means 63 more home dates versus 55 more on the road, and 7 of those are coming up in the course of this week. Once they get back, they’ll have quite a bit of the home-cookin’ from here on out. But we’re still talking about maintaining an overall .600 winning percentage, and the Brewers are just 11-9 at home.
What if they split the rest of the road games (which is what you kind of need to do, at a minimum, to be a winning ballclub)? Let’s say they go 27-28 the rest of the year on the road. They’d have to be 43-20 at home, a .680 winning percentage. Phew.
Baseball involves a LOT of numbers, and you’ll find no shortage of ways to dissect everything about the sport out on the ‘tubes, the TV, or in the paper. In the end, this is just another way of saying, “It ain’t early. It’s starting to be desperate.”
The Republican Party’s best hope for winning elections ever since we invaded Iraq in 2003 is to make a certain segment of malleable voters too afraid to pick a candidate OTHER than them. It is going to be a long, long, election season, and this will not even come close to being the last you hear about it:
McCain criticizes Obama over Iran comments
McCain’s camp is counting on people hearing buzz words like “reckless” and “inexperience” and “terrorism” as a means of planting doubt about any possible course other than guns-blazing and unconditional deference to the United States. There was another very successful international superpower in world history that operated the same way– The Roman Empire. They’re not around anymore, but…
When sifting through these stories, it’s important to get all the details and sift down to the facts of the respective arguments. When Obama says he’s willing to meet with the leaders of Iran, he’s not saying that Iran is awesome, or even that they’re no threat. He’s saying that the American President should have the courage to look the leader of an adversarial nation in the face and say, “let’s settle our differences peacefully.”
It’s not going to be easy to keep standing up in the face of the constant GOP beat-down on this issue. They will do everything they possibly can to make it seem crazy, illogical, and impossible to support Obama’s position on foreign affairs. I feel like if you really think it through, it’s easy to see that Obama is looking to be more inclusive of all nations, while remaining vigilant as to the risks. McCain, meanwhile, is more vested in the infallibility of the United States, and conducting diplomacy through the barrel of a gun.
L.A. resident, UW-Oshkosh alum and general chum Matt Marshall would like us all to be aware of the following video clip starring his state’s governor. You may have to crank the speakers a little bit.
Logged in to my checking today to find a pleasant $600 surprise. Well, it was only a mild surprise, of course, but nice to see it a little ahead of schedule anyway. For those that might wonder what this means for YOUR rebate, be aware that I get my tax refunds by direct deposit, and the last two of my SSN are 99.
Off now to do the opposite of what the administration was hoping, and chuck this money into savings…
Hot off the Vatican press: you are clear to believe in aliens.
This can only bode well for the relationship of Mulder (a true believer) and Scully (a true Catholic). Try not trip over your own feet while you’re staring at the sky, Padre.
It feels like it was just the other day that I was here talking about a great episode of This American Life. Gotta say that I really enjoyed the show from this past weekend, too. They talked about the roots of the credit crisis, and for a financial novice like myself, I found the show to accessible and informative. I came away with a much more thorough understanding of the events that led us to our current economic state of affairs.
One additional question that I had afterwards was, “What were the comparable specifics that led to the economic downturns of the 1930s and the 1970s?” I’m sure I learned these things in history classes (10-15 years ago) but I don’t really recall. It’s baffling to realize that even though we, as a species, recognize that mistakes in history tends to repeat themselves, mistakes keep happening, and the cycle goes round and round.
Give a listen to episode #355, “The Giant Pool of Money,” if you get a chance.
I just read an interesting little article about the use of “biogas” (basically natural gas harvested from rotting manure) in India. Found it via New Scientist.
Also wanted to quickly take this opportunity to mention commencement and open houses for next weekend. I didn’t just start thinking about it, but I’ve been slowly working on a post about this graduation stuff for about a month now, and it’s too late to finish it. So:
I understand that is very short notice. What’re we gonna do?
Dave and I were at the baseball game last night. Glad we stayed until the bittersweet end— you may have seen the highlights of Rickie Weeks doubling in a pair of runs to snatch a victory from the division-leading Cardinals. Even though the pitching hung in there and Manny Parra settled in to a decent outing once the dust settled on his first two rocky innings, it was still a struggle to be able to watch these guys methodically eek out hits throughout the game. We watched the same players just light people up last year, so that makes it a little frustrating. I turned to Dave in the top of the 8th and said, “You know it’s gotten bad when we’re down just 1 run and you don’t feel like there’s a chance of pulling it out.”
Well, I spoke too soon. Sheets takes to the hill in about 20 minutes, and we’ve got a chance to get back to .500 (uughh), and within 3 games of first place. Who thought that this division was going to be such a dogfight? Answer: nobody. I forget where I was reading earlier this week that pitchers are approaching our young guns (Fielder, Braun, et al.) a little differently this season, now that they’ve had a whole year to adjust. Once again, for the 3rd year in a row, the Brewers find themselves at a sort of crossroads: in ’06, it was “can we finish with a winning record after a 81-81 ’05?”, then in ’07, it was “now that everyone has ‘arrived,’ will we deliver on all the potential?”, and here in ’08, it’s “can we continue to persevere after our chance of sneaking up on people has ended?”
We’ll find out. Go Crew!
Michelle is in the air at the moment, probably rapidly descending into New York by now. Last night, one of the things that she asked me to help her out with was getting access to the iTunes Music Store and her iPod itself on her computer at home.
She runs the latest version of Ubuntu, at her own request.* I thought that this should pretty easy anyway, since she has a virtual Windows installation on there for stuff that you, well, y’know, have to have Windows for.** I would just make sure I could get the USB rokkin on the virtual machine, install iTunes, and she’d be done and done.
That turned out to be a lot more complex than I thought it would be. I never did manage to get USB working in VirtualBox OSE, but I’ve got it all set in my VMWare Windows machine on the laptop. I probably spent an hour or more trying to get it fixed on her desktop. The recent upgrade that I did complicated running the virtual machine itself, so there was a good chunk of that hour wasted right there…
Then when I moved this iTunes-installing-and-using operation over to MY laptop, there was a whole different problem of just being able to get the virtual machine to recognize that the iPod was plugged in. It was as if Ubuntu didn’t want to completely give it up. Finally, I managed to get that to happen, too, but I quickly managed to initiate a process of “sync”-ing the iPod, which, apparently, will go ahead and wipe everything off of it. Which is on one hand, total bullshit, and on the other, awfully disheartening when you’ve been working on getting this damn thing to work for 3 hours. This is not to mention to fact that the syncing process took FOREVER, given that the USB support, while present in VMWare, is merely of the version 1.1 variety (versus the standard, commonly recognized, vastly superior, HIGH-SPEED USB 2.0).
I do understand, on a basic level, why these frakkin iPods are so locked down and a pain the ass to try to work with. I dig that you can’t use the Music Store with anything but a Mac or a Windows PC. But that doesn’t mean I can’t bitch about it. I thought it was a profound drag that I spent so much time dicking around with this problem that I’ve never had copying mp3s over to an SD card and plugging it into my PDA, for example.
What this did make me decide I should do, though, is come up with an more effective means of using Windows on the desktop machine. Dual-booting would be one option, but I don’t know if I’m interested in blowing the hard disk space or the partitioning effort on that. How often do I really need to use Windows? I think I can count all the occasions in the year on one hand. I’ve become much more interested in scoping out this Windows-on-a-thumb-drive option. Not only is it more complex than re-partitioning and installing Windows on the side, I’ve never done it before, so it will require quite a bit more effort. Right up my alley, where personal computing is concerned.
I think I’ll get started on it now, since it’s relatively early and the Brewers are getting smoked once again…
* – Granted, her request was not necessarily for Ubuntu, but when I set up this machine that she has right now and offered to install XP, she said, “Well, I don’t really want Windows…” Very sexy.
** – Those would be things Netflix, TurboTax, and goddamned iTunes.
