BTW, let’s just make terrorism legal under international law like piracy effectively is. Make obstruction of such activity the crime. No particular reason – let’s just do it for kicks.

It makes you wonder how much something like this would be capable of if its movements were learned rather than programmed. Gymnastics? Maybe not but light maintenance work and truncheon wielding? Perhaps. Man, I’d pay to see that. Especially an electro-truncheon directed towards rich kid anarchy protesters. “Konnichiwa hypocrite thugs”. (BONK! ZAP)

A guy in Japan is working on a humanoid robot project and unlike many others, this one is tall. (Via this BotJunkie Post)

Now granted he needs to become more steady and they need to get him some time on the firing range and it would be helpful if his comically big eyebrows were to flare natural gas to make him look more combat ready but he’s interesting. And while he needs theme music that is more heavy metal and less Super Mario, I bet he could push ASIMO down a flight of stairs.

I recently read an article (possibly in Discover Magazine but I didn’t find it in a search of their web site – even as a summary) about some researchers who are pursuing a different form of chip architecture that uses far lower power. Currently a human level information processing device running on conventional chips would, according to the article, require a small hydroelectric plant to run. Yet the human brain works on about 20 volts, The human brain does not use high power signals to prevent noise being seen as signal but rather uses timing and redundancy – plus accommodating some noise as a source of creativity, in all likelihood. They claim their prototype novel chip architecture is already showing some impressive testing results and a next generation version is highly anticipated. There are other ways in which AI is making strides by learning from brain architecture and perhaps some of these techniques will be compatible.

On the hardware side, moving the power source away from the joint as in animals makes a lot of sense and using elastic shock absorbers could give much more fluid motion (once they learn how).

Snakes share a common ancestor with lizards and you can find vestigial leg bones in pythons but it seems that a mutation reactivated the combination of genes which govern leg formation, albeit on one side only. The woman who discovered it woke up to a scratching noise and saw it clinging to her wall. She killed it with a shoe and then preserved it in a bottle of alcohol which will only give you snake flavored alcohol, not genuine snake wine but is a good means of fixing the specimen for scientific study. Good thinking Mrs. Dean Duan “>Qiongxiu! (or Duan Qiongxiu, the article spells it both ways and I would guess that Duan is more likely to be a common name in south west China than Dean). It would be better to use a bottle of formalin but not many people drink formalin in today’s health conscious world.

I like the quote from the snake expert who got the critter:

Snake expert Long Shuai said: “It is truly shocking but we won’t know the cause until we’ve conducted an autopsy.”

It’s okay snake expert, the cause of death was already established when the woman confessed to killing it with a shoe. Unless Long (great name for a snake expert) means the cause of the mutation in which case I suspect the snake was doing crystal meth. That stuff will mess you up both body and mind.

(via Picture is Unrelated)

HAPPY RAMADAN!!!

To my many millions of Muslim readers and customers.* Halal nachos after sundown; half-price! Free for apostates. They have enough to worry about.

*We do have snake juice for the more observant Muslims (no, JUICE! Not Jews – though we have some of them too, especially on Hebrew Thursdays; half-price on any spoken beverage order that can fool me into thinking it’s in Hebrew. So if you’re really antisemitic you might want to phone ahead on Thursdays to see if it’s Hebrew night.)