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LawnBott: The Roomba for Yardwork
The LawnBott electric mower can be programmed in advance, comes with a remote control for those who want to supervise, and cuts up to 33,000 square feet on a single charge. At nearly $2,000 it ain’t exactly cheap, but if this sucker works as advertised I’d be tempted to own one.Link
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The 25 Best…Well, Something
So I saw this article on Yahoo News, stating that Entertainment Weekly had released a list of the very best SF TV and movies in the past 25 years, and that The Matrix had come in at #1. And I thought, “Oh, hell no,” and clicked over to the site, full of righteous indignation…only to…
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O*W*C Site Mirrors BoingBoing
In February 2006, BoingBoing was added to the list of sites blocked by SmartFilter, making it inaccessible to people in various countries and organizations. Mark Christian began Distributed BoingBoing, a project to make Boing Boing accessible to those who are trapped behind firewalls running SmartFilter and other overzealous censorware.The O*W*C, no friend of censorship, is…
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Huh
Carel Struycken, whose acting resume essentially consists of, “That Big Guy” (he played Mr. Homn on ST:TNG and Lurch in the Addams Family movies), has a hobby taking really amazing spherical panoramic pictures. Unexpected. Neat.Link
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R.I.P. Wally Schirra
Astronaut Walter M. “Wally” Schirra Jr., one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the only man to fly on all three of NASA’s early space missions, has died at the age of 84, NASA officials confirmed Thursday.Link
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NASA Tackles Death and Sex
Now that NASA is seriously thinking about a Mars mission, not to mention perhaps someday exploring extrasolar Earthlike planets, they’re beginning to consider who-gets-thrown-from-the-lifeboat questions such as how long to keep a critically ill astronaut alive before pulling the plug and conserving the air and energy he’s wasting. In a masterstroke of understatement, they’ve also…
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Science Merit Badges
The Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above-Average Physique have a bunch of new merit badges! Recently, our badges have doubled in number (new ones include various levels of the “I build robots” badge; the “I’ve named a child or pet for science” badge” and the “I AM actually a freakin’ rocket…
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Hey, Maybe We Can Make the Kessel Run in Less Than 12 Parsecs
Researchers may be ready for experimental tests of an honest-to-goodness hyperdrive engine. If the experiment gets the go-ahead and works, it could reveal new interactions between the fundamental forces of nature that would change the future of space travel. Forget spending six months or more holed up in a rocket on the way to Mars,…
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As I’ve Often Said…
…if you want to see real cutting-edge technology, you should visit a toy store.A company called NeuroSky is on the brink of marketing a toy that reads brainwaves. They’ve already got a prototype “Darth Vader” toy–when you concentrate, your light saber lights up–but they’re looking to revolutionize the way video games are played. Rather than…
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Minutiae
At three minutes and four seconds after 2 AM on the 6th of May this year, the time and date will be 02:03:04 05/06/07