robot-alert!

I have just finished off a huge box of PG Tips Freeflow(TM) pyramid-shaped tea bags. I was probably drinking it for three or four months. It was mostly me as well, since Marvin doesn't drink tea (not very authentically English of her!). So this morning, I bought an even huger box of PG Tips. I was noticing that the tea bags don't taste any different.

Does tea last forever? Does it have an expiration date? Does the tea gradually lose its flavour over the course of years and years? Does anybody know? We need a tea-theory expert. Also, while I'm on the subject, why are PG Tips called PG Tips?

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A concept so delicious it must surely succeed. As well as the standard Steak Shake, Pork Shake and Turkey Shake, they offer celebrity specials such as the Lars' "Mutton Else Matters" Shake and the Ricky's "Liver La Vida Loca" Shake. YuM !!!

This might be of interest to Marvin or other theatre-loving people. Kazan directed On the Waterfront which is that one with Brando I believe.

Mr. Kazan's achievements in theater and cinema helped define the American experience for more than a generation. For Broadway, his legendary productions included "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Death of a Salesman." His movie classics included "On the Waterfront" and "East of Eden."

To many critics, he was the best director of American actors in stage and screen history, discovering Marlon Brando, James Dean and Warren Beatty and redefining the craft of film acting. In 1953 the critic Eric Bentley wrote that "the work of Elia Kazan means more to the American theater than that of any current writer."

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I do feel it's necessary to have something about the upcoming Dr Who TV show on this site. They are going to revive it on the Beeb with Russell T Davies writing it (he created Queer as Folk over here). I have to say I 'have mixed feelings about it, as the show is mainly a nostalgia-magnet for me. The notion of modernising it in some way would fill me with horror. On the other hand, there might be some way ofworking the nostagia element into it in a good way. This piece from the Grauniad sums it up pretty well.

But that ghastly Americanised version of the programme was symptomatic. In our heart of hearts, we fans know that (however inappropriately for a show about time travel) Doctor Who is inescapably a product of its era. As Alan Bennett wrote in this paper on Saturday, BBC television of the 1960s and 1970s was "a haven for the odd and the eccentric, a ramshackle set-up". An educational sci-fi series in which an old man and a teenage girl travel through time in a police telephone box? In 2003, it would never get past the focus groups. In 1963, the BBC commissioned a nine-month run.

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This one is from Somalia, but I imagine Mike N. saw trucks like this all the time in Iowa.

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Who will win??

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Maybe robots are useful after all, albeit in a slightly evil way. This guy built one that roams around at tech conferences, sniffing out Wi-Fi wireless LAN connections, and displaying people's passwords on a screen.

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This guy makes balancing robots that are supposed to be good for a wide variety of tasks. The only problem is they don't have heads. In one of the movies on this site, they put a fake head on it to make it look more normal.

Anything, Anytime, Anywhere – Anybots are coming.
We design and build mechanical assistants that can perform
a wide variety of tasks in a wide variety of environments.

We are building humanoid robots useful for:
-- Exploration and reconnaissance
-- Industrial applications such as remote equipment maintenance
-- Household chores such as cleaning, cooking, and laundry

The basic configuration of an AnyBot is similar to that of a human, with two arms and two legs. Advanced body coordination software allows Anybots to traverse difficult terrain and adapt to the environment..

It seems like there are a lot of people making robots out there, despite the fact that no one has actually proven that robots are useful for stuff besides making cars. It seems like it's only a matter of time before one of these robot-obsessed inventors turns out to be someone evil, and makes a robot that is intended, not for cleaning and laundry, but for carnage.

Actually, those Singaporean gun-toting police robots aren't too far off the mark already, now that i think about it.link

Here is a cartoon you might like, Marv. I have seen it before but it didn't make that big of an impression the first time. It's pretty clever though really.

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I was just remembering this old episode of the animated TV show The Hulk from when I was little. It is about the hulk against a big evil computer system. This episode must have made quite an impression on me. I think part of me still thinks of computers and information systems as being controlled by a megalomaniacal artificial intelligence hidden away in the background somewhere.

The Cyclops Computer - Created by Dr. Donovan, it is a supercomputer designed to interface with all military computers as well as various other electronic devices. It also has complete control over the electronic devices at Cyclops Mountain, including robots, holographic generators, and disintegrator disposal units. It leaves its signature "eye" on the machines it controls.

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My fantasy has become a reality. The Beef lobby in America is making cheeseburger fries. They come straight out of a laboratory. It is a mixture of cheese and beef and breading that you can eat like french fries. I am really excited about this. I hope the beef lobby comes to England too although I guess there are not as many ranchers and cattlemen here.

Looking to emulate the success of Chicken McNuggets and fried mozzarella sticks, the group is hoping to inject some red meat into the American snack food diet with cheeseburger fries. The fries, which look like a squat version of standard French fries, are made of a meat-and-cheese compound that tastes — as the name suggests — like a cheeseburger.

Breaded, then deep-fried and served with ketchup or barbecue sauce, cheeseburger fries have found their way onto menus in several states including Nebraska, Minnesota and Texas since June. There is also a version being made available to public school cafeterias.

"The challenge is getting people to think of other ways to eat beef," said Betty Hogan, director of new product development for the association.

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I had my first day at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, part of University of Central England. It's a master's course in illustration (technically, in Visual Communications) and you mix with students from other disciplines, like animation and advertising (two chaps from India I was talking to yesterday). My final project (in two years! gulp) is going to have something to do with comic books, graphic art and drawing. Other than that it's all very nebulous at the moment.

A couple of the instructors gave us their Web addresses. David Miles is a photographer doing a project on reconstructing images from the Book of Revelations. Chu does mad drawings and stuff including some animations. In one of them you can shoot hamburgers at demented mickey mouse children.

The pirate movie was good by the way... particularly Keira Knightley who is very tall.

It looks like the comment thing isn't working. Anyway, those space books. I used to read stuff like that obsessively when I was growing up in the 1980s. There were a couple of books by Robert Heinlein that particularly got my imagination going - Have Spacesuit Will Travel and Space Cadet. Both of them were aimed at kids which is probably why I liked them, and was repelled by Heinlein's more serious and philosophical novels, which come across as kind of fascist.

Have Spacesuit Will Travel is about a guy who gets involved in an alien plot to take over earth, and ends up zooming away millions of light years to a kind of galactic version of the UN where he meets a cave man, a Roman and a lot of aliens. It's all very lighthearted. Space Cadet is a little more preachy but there are lots of glorious details of the supposedly near-future setting, describing how they've colonised the orbital space near Earth and how the Space Patrol (or whatever it is called) is organised. They learn stuff through hypnotism and have to learn how to control rockets. Another good one in the same vein was The Rolling Stones (this is all 1950s, you understand...) which is about a family who live on the Moon and end up going on a kind of road trip through space to Jupiter or something. Oh and there was one about some teenaged boys who foil a neo-Nazi plot to build an atomic rocket launch facility on the Moon... they actually go up there to foil the plot, you understand...

Some of the short stories set in "future history" have the same feeling I liked so much, of "realistically" describing how the future works in a way that you could really picture it. Of course a lot of it was nonsense, like the conviction that nuclear rockets are the way to go. One time I looked up Heinlein's "future history" timeline to see when he expected people to colonise the moon, so I could figure out if I would be able to go there in my lifetime. I think I worked out that I would be able to make the trip at about 70.

Two other books that really take me back are Out of the Cradle and, funnily enough, The Grand Tour. The first one is about the future of space exploration (circa 1984) and the second is a planet-by-planet tour of the solar system. Both of them have these detailed, matter-of-fact paintings depicting stuff like bases on Mars, explorer craft making their way through the asteroid belt, etc. I wanted to be able to drive one of those things around in the asteroid belt and then go back to base, followed by a nice restaurant lunch on Mars before I caught the trans-planetary express back to Earth. I guess I eventually settled for living in Asia and Europe, which don't seem quite as exotic.

Illustrations from books about space travel from 1870 to 1970. The books have names like Build Your Own Moon Settlement, You will go to the Moon and Off into space!!

We are looking for somewhere to host robot alert permanently but illfuckinghostit.com may be a little bit too crazy. Among their unconventional terms and conditions: "From now on, We will be posting the emails, and IP's of the people who violated our Terms of service, hopefully they will get spammed up the arse!"

The wasps (not hornets after all) were out in force over the weekend. I had the window open to the bedroom while doing stuff on Saturday and I must have swatted about five of them. Not to mention the three that woke us up on Saturday morning with their loud and threatening buzzing. There must be a nest somewhere. Today it is rainy though, which seems to be keeping them away so far.

Today is No Car Day in France. Seventy-two cities around the country have banned cars to raise awareness about pollution. This has been happening once a year since 1998. Very sensible.

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Hey Marvin, this is one you would like. It is an archive of text posts sent to electronic bulletin board systems starting in the 1980s. A cool, retro-digital type of concept. Unfortunately when you look at the actual posts (including the 'top 10') they are really pretty dull. All about computers mostly. Here is a good one though, it is a solution to the game Adventure.

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One of the hornets came back. I got it this time for sure I think. I think I am going to have to open the window again to get rid of the hair remover smell, even though more hornets might come in.

My flat is infested with hornets! They have been appearing gradually this week. Today there are three of them flying around the flat. I think they are attracted by a combination of the floral curtains and the light of my desk lamp, although they also like to fly around in the bathroom. They kept buzzing around my head.

Finally I swatted one with my notebook. It disappeared, probably stunned somewhere. Then I started to get scared because I thought it would come back and kill me once it woke up from its stunned state. I saw more of them buzzing around angrily. I couldn't reach them with my notebook so I looked for something to spray them with.

The only thing I could find was some hair removal spray in the bathroom. I tried spraying them with it but it had no effect except to cover everything with gooey, floral-smelling droplets. I ran out of the room before they could counter-attack.

I found a newspaper and came back in. This was a better weapon. I was able to swat them with it even though they wre up by the ceiling. But still no dead hornet corpses! They must just be stunned again. I went back to work but kept thinking I heard their buzzing starting again, like before except more furious.

I swatted them again but i still don't know if they are going to wake up and come back from the dead to wreak vengeance with many stings and bites. I keep thinking I hear their buzzing. Everything smells like floral leg hair remover. I hope it iwll be OK...

I love the ads Blogger is putting on our site. In some ways they are better than the posts we are putting up ourselves. Like the Adept Robot page.

The robot’s design is unsurpassed for high speed, reliable, light-payload assembly, handling, and packaging applications. The Adept Cobra 600 incorporates the same base mounting pattern as Adept’s previous 550 series robots, as well as the same tool-flange for customer’s tooling interchangeability. The hollow Z-axis quill provides a convenient passage for both pneumatic and electrical user lines, and has been strengthened for greater rigidity in case of collisions with peripheral equipment.

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One of those ads for the Evening Mail, the local tabloid rag. I had to do a double take. I wasn't sure if it was a headline, or a list of topics you're likely to find in a typical issue.

GIRL

GUN

DEATH

OUTRAGE

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I really like this prank. It is ingenius because has built-in detection proof-ness. James, can we come up with a similar prank for when I visit Birmingham? Or would that lead to terrible violence?

"I would make a new dessert card for McDonald's Apple Pie, but would carefully integrate an image of Jason Biggs. Jason played the role of Jim Levenstein in the movie, well known for loving apple pie. It was perfect!"

On the side of a big truck that I passed on the walk to work this morning, there was an advertisement where they had put the pieces of it together in the wrong order, as sometimes happens. It was like William S. Burroughs' cut-up experiments:

DIFFIC NING? ULT MOR

(The slogan is, 'difficult morning?')

Woob, since you're giving up minigolf, here is a possible alternative.

U.X. Open golf leaves the manicured fairways, dress codes, rules and costs at the country club and offers an extreme challenge ... up, down, and across a 10-hole mountain course, with 10 rules catering to the rocky terrain. Instead of putting, participants pitch the ball onto a painted 20-30 foot circle; a four-club limit; less severe penalties for lost balls and unplayable lies; and no dress code ... although hiking boots are strongly recommended and ski lifts are the preferred mode of transport.

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This is apparently a parody of an iPod advertisement, but I think it stands pretty well on its own. Don't forget about Talk Like a Pirate Day on Friday!

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They appear beside freeways or taped to overpasses, then disappear again, spookily.

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A high school student in Utah built a fusion reactor out of spare parts. I like the fact that he seems like kind of a hayseed. Have they checked that it's not just a computer graphic playing on a TV set?

Also, this begs the question: What kind of a place is Idaho Falls that this kid and his dad can kind of casually pick up a neutron detector in a local scrap metal yard and a turbo molecular pump in some dumpster?

The apparatus is nothing less than the sine qua non of modern science: a nuclear fusion reactor, based on the plans of Utah's own Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television.
The reactor sat on a table with an attached vacuum pump wheezing away. A television monitor showed what was inside: a glowing ball of gas surrounded by a metal helix.
The ball is, literally, a small sun, where an electric field forces deuteron ions (a form of hydrogen) to gather, bang together and occasionally fuse, spitting out a neutron each time fusion occurs.
"Here I am with this thing here," Wallace mused, looking at his surroundings. "Who'da thought?"

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We drove down to Oxfordshire again for the weekend, for the lovely Philip's birthday. I guess I've lost my American tolerance for endless driving.

A scientist saw a programme about the female brain, and reprogrammed his robots to be better at housework.

"If a man does the housework, he'll load the washing machine then stand there and watch it," Dr Hill said. "A woman will go off and do something else."...

The co-operation is most evident in the robots' ability to talk about problems they experience while doing their jobs. In many cases they will work out their own solution to an unexpected problem and tell the operator how they have resolved it.

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Ah, London. How I miss it. A 'magician' called David Blaine is currently suspending himself inside a glass box over the Thames right next to my old office. Yesterday some cheeky Londoners decided to spell out a message for him.

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This is one of the funniest things I have possibly ever seen. People sneak up behind their unsuspecting colleagues and rock out while somebody else films. Check out the 'best of' video. The only problem with it is the duff pseudo-disco soundtrack. Could somebody please set this to, like, 'Burn Baby Burn' or something?

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I am going to try and post some of the old items from the beta version of robot-alert! here sometime. It was from back in 2000 when blogs didn't exist (or at least i had never heard of them). In the mean time, you can see the goodness for yourself on the Wayback Machine.

Laser-powered robo-rats in space

After years of struggling against almost insurmountable odds, humankind has finally succeeded in building a race giant robotic rats with laser fitted eye-guns that are to be sent into outer space.

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I found out the hard way that Netscape and Intenret Explorer are different. I had a tag in some of the images that Netscape didnt mind, but IE did. The result was, my drawings didn't show up in the blog for people using IE. It is now fixed.

So, now you all need to go back and re-look at all the posts, please.

I also discovered that if people post comments using IE, you don't see them if you look at the site in Netscape. How dumb is that!

Indian scientists say the ASIMO robot from Honda is sexier than a real human, and can take the work out of foreplay and stuff.

Dr Prasada Raju of Department of Science and Technology, GOI, says ASIMO was initially designed "to perform unusual tasks beyond normal human capability".

But he added: "What we have actually achieved goes far beyond that. Saving young couples from breaking apart could be another un-looked for bonus."

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There are these Linux robots. Not just one of them but a whole swarm! And they communicate with one another telepathically. If you get in trouble, don't worry. They will rescue you. (video)

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Rate my kitten! It is a site full of kitten pictures that you can rate. Need we say more?

# Browse through thousands of kittens and cats
# Cast your vote: 10 is the best and 1 is... not so good
# User accounts allow one to track an image's progress, see list of all images uploaded
# Status of your upload is available immediately, upon approval a link into the site appears
# Upload your kitten pictures
# Updated hourly: Top 20

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I have just discovered a really cool illustrator. Graham Roumieu. Apparently he is famous. Hopefully, he is some kind of rock star or Donald Trump figure in Canadian terms, with a jet and a swimming pool.

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Here is some nice fan poetry from the Wheel of Time fantasy universe. The shorter verses are in fornyrdislag, the longer in drottkvættr.

The wheel of time trembles
Man's dark days come closer
Servants' faith does falter
Spears lose their sharpness

Turning spokes and burns
Dragon's fate shall speak soon
From guardians ill blood kill
Sun rise, proud and unwise

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The 'air muscle' has got to be one of the best-sounding actuators out there. For one thing, it is 'friendly'.

The Air Muscle consists of a rubber tube covered in tough plastic netting which shortens in length like a human muscle when inflated with compressed air at low pressure. It is soft, has no stiction, is easily controllable and exceptionally powerful.

And keep in mind that these are very compliant. In fact, 'Being a soft actuator, Air Muscles systems are inherently compliant,' apparently. A variety are available. This is no ordinary actuator, by gum!
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Don't ask me why I dreamed about Paul Theroux. I've read one or two of his books and I think he's a wanker. In the dream he was writing an adorably cranky critique of Gen-X literature and why it is so hollow. By contrast his own work was disciplined and based on meaningful rules. My comics were lumped in with the Gen-X novelty crap that he despised, although, gratifyingly, he spent a several pages of his essay on them. Apparently I was very trendy at the time the dream took place, which seemed to be in the early to mid 1990s.

We are starting to get settled in the flat. We went from a two-bedroom house to a one-bedroom flat, so I built a couple of room partitions out of closet doors and some hinges. My studio is behind the dividers. The canvas-side do-it-yourself wardrobe also came in handy. It was immediately filled with crap.

...on the fast-moving life of James Lee Pig.

It has been a whirlwind since about mid-March. First there was the wedding (mine and Anna's), which finally happened in early May, after a year of faffing about. On the train to Edinburgh for our honeymoon, Anna applied for an interesting job in Birmingham. A week after we got back, she was given the job. I gave my notice at work, we let out our house in Didcot, and we rented a place in Birmingham.

While we were arranging this, incidentally, there was this exhibition to co-organise. At the end of May, for Oxfordshire Art Weeks, Jill Cooper and I put some of our work on show at her Wantage studio. She's a brilliant and quirky sculptor and I framed a few of my drawings from the Tube to go alongside her work. Interesting, but there were rather a lot of distractions at the time...

The next big chore was moving house, which is never pleasant. We did it about three weeks ago, although there is still a huge pile of half-empty cardboard boxes in the middle of the living room floor. I installed an ADSL broadband connection and a home network (all of which took me about a week), so I could work from home for ZDNet - which I'm doing now, for a few more weeks.

A week after moving in, I spent a week doing 12 hours of driver training. At the end of the week, I took my driving test. The lady testing me seemed a bit freaked out when I roared around a right-hand turn on a red traffic light (that's the equivalent of a left-hand turn in the US). And there was that incident where my wing-mirror was maladjusted, leading me to screech to a halt in the middle of a busy street to fix it... Well, she passed me anyway.

The week after that I had the Big Interview at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, which appears to offer the only postgraduate programme in illustration or fine art in the Midlands. I was accepted to that with the caveat that I won't be able to call it an MA in illustration. It will be an MA in Visual Communications, a name which could be applied to a punch in the face.

The programme starts in a couple of weeks. It's just one day a week (Tuesdays) but looks interesting. They have a printmaking workshop.

I spent most of last week working on the French lettering of my upcoming book, The Grand Tour (not that kind of French letter mind you). I've completed a computer-lettered draft of all 160 pages and a rough draft of the cover. It comes from my sketchbooks of travelling in Europe and the US last autumn, and will hopefully come out in time for a comics convention in Toulouse in November.

For now I'm going to be working long-distance for ZDNet, going to BIAD one day a week, and doing freelance comics and illustration. The ZDNet job will end in a few weeks and then I'll get some other job, don't know where yet.

End of update...

Shiver me timbers!!! Next Friday is talk like a pirate day.
Be careful not to behave like one though.

...that someone posts something else here soon. The sight of that Hideshi Hino toy at the top of the page is starting to make me queasy...

This isn't directly about robots, but there are these weird toys. I remember seeing manga by Hideshi Hino before, I think he did a horrible comic about evil dead babies. Why are Japanese people strange?

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That band, the Pixies, are getting back together. They seem a bit odd to me.

Francis changed his name to Frank Black later that year (inspiring the name of the lead character in the apocalyptic television series "Millennium") and faxed the group a statement announcing their breakup.

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Robocats are indistinguishable from organic felines. But they are trained kill. link

This looks like an interesting and potentially profitable read. link

Welcome to the v2.0 of Robot Alert. Hopefully we'll have some new messages shortly - as the saying goes. For now, just remember to keep on the lookout for evil robot tendencies, particularly in your neighbours.