This story from the BBC explains how researchers at Cornell have created a very simple robot that can assemble a duplicate of itself.
Now, it’s not the time to panic (yet). The robot can only really
assemble a duplicate of itself if it has the correct parts. In this
case, each robot is made up of three cubes, each of which contain
motors, a processor, and programming. Aside from making more of
themselves out of these building blocks, the robots really can’t do
much else.
“Battlin’ the bastards is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.” Jim Hightower, from his keynote speech at the MRC, May 14, 2005.
When something new comes along, we tend to describe what it is. If it’s something important, it takes a while to figure out why it’s important – what it is that is really different. The description of what something is tends to be somewhat dry and technical and it misses the point. For example, a telegraph is an encoder and a decoder in an electric circuit. But couriers and semaphores involve coders and decoders, and other stuff has had electric circuits. What was important about the telegraph was that it provided instantaneous long-distance communication. This is also what was important about its successors like the telephone and radio, even though the descriptions of what each is are quite different than that of the telegraph. It’s not as simple as describing what a new invention does for people. Quite often we don’t know how it will be used.
Since I first heard about Croquet, I’ve been trying to figure out what is really important about the immersive 3D that everyone first notices about it. I think I now have an idea. It turns out that the “immersive” part is key.
Here are my notes from the various sessions.
Just finished the pre-game show here in St. Louis. It’s already shaping up nto be a huge conference here. It made attending the fourth iteration of “the academic and the activist should be friends” worthwhile. Why do self-organizing iterative processes need to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat? More below . . .
For the next few days, I’ll be blogging live from Free Press’ media reform conference in St. Louis. Sell out crowd of 2200 academics, activists, and random folks getting together to discuss the media reform movement and how to move forward.
Right now, I’m in the “Academic Brain Trust” pre-session. 120 people getting in early to figure out how to get academics involved in this despite the fact that university departments make it impossible to do anything that relates to the real world, particularly if you don’t have tenure.
I expect I will try to do daily wrap ups rather than bug everyone hourly now that we have RSS feeds.
Stay tuned . . .
Due to popular demand, I’ve added RSS feeds for the individual blogs. Plus, there are some other goodies as well.
According to my friends at Free Press, the forces of municipal broadband won a major victory in Florida. Following a nasty legislative fight in the heart of Bell South territory, the Republican dominated legislature saw fit to impose only one condition on municipal broadband — annual reports.
Score since PA: Public interest- 3, Incumbents-0, Tie-1 (WV, where positive legislation was neutralized)
Stay tuned . . . .
It’s not too hard to imagine where this trend is going.
Fans of Harold Feld’s “Tales of the Sausage Factory” and/or Howard Stearns’s “Inventing the Future” will be happy to note that those columns are now their own blogs within Wetmachine. TotSF and IfF posts will continue to be integrated on the Wetmachine front page, but if you just want the pure stuff (undiluted by my ramblings, e.g.) you can bookmark the column you want.
The respective urls are Tales and Inventing. You can also get to them from this page by clicking on their links to the right, under the heading “sections.”
We’ve also improved access to the archives. Other improvments, including rss feeds, will be forthcoming.
Thanks to Gary for pulling this together. . .
