The addition of the arm makes this machine appear to be much more useful. Via Borepatch.
Petoi Bittle, now available on Indiegogo - a Realistic Palm-sized Robot Dog for STEM and Fun
Rongzhong Li
This popped up on YouTube. It looks to be pretty robust. I expect we'll be seeing some interesting / surprising / worrisome applications for this tiny machine.
Why SpaceX Bought a Robotic Dog
Primal Space
This video gives some examples where this machine might actually be useful for things besides playing games.
With the advances in robotic technology, I think we need to be working on some kind of AI (artificial intelligence) personality module, something we could talk to, that could make wisecracks and provide snarky sound bites for the evening news, i.e. something people could care about, which is what NASA needs to keep funding space exploration.
Starship SN9 flew yesterday and in a repeat of SN8, crashed on landing. Have to give them credit though, it was an accurate crash. SN10 was sitting just a few hundred yards away and apparently unaffected by the explosion. I suspect the problem comes from not really having a good handle on how those cryogenic liquids are behaving while the ship is going through all these gyrations, but how could you? Nobody has ever done this kind of thing before.
I was surprised by how slow the liftoff appears. It looks like the ship is just crawling up the screen in the few seconds right after lift off. I try to remember this thing is nearly 200 feet tall, but I really don't have a feel for how big that is. Out here in the wilds of Silicon Forest the tallest building is maybe four stories. 200 feet? May as well say a zillion feet. It's incomprehensible. You feel me, man?
Title stolen from The Silicon Underground. In case you don't know how the ship got its name, I'll tell you because it is such a dumb story, so dumb that I will be repeating it for years. When it was being assembled in the giant assembly building (the 'high bay'), part of the support structure it was resting on collapsed causing it to lean over against the wall of the building, hence 'Eileeen'. I don't know about the Dover part, except that the fall back to Earth is done in the horizontal position and is called the 'belly-flop maneuver', and a belly-flop is a particularly graceless dive, and dove is the past tense of dive, and so we move on to Dover? I dunno, but I like it.
Given all my other problems, my concern over the cost of filling up my car once a week is near the bottom. Still, this pair of photos made me curious enough to do a little Googling.
Never mind the confusing title on this graph (How can it be a graph of the price of Regular gasoline if it also includes high-test / super / premium or whatever you call it?), let's just pretend that the EIA (U. S. Energy Information Administration) knows what they are talking about.
So gasoline cost just over one dollar a gallon for most of the 1990's, then it started going up until it hit $4 a gallon back around 2008. For the last 15 years the price has been bouncing up and down, sometimes rather violently.
This seemed a little odd to me. I suspect the demand for gasoline is fairly constant, a zillion people drive to work every day. So why would the price bounce around so much? I suspect it is because the oil business is running on very thin margins*. Yes, they are still making what looks like a ton of money because of the volume of oil, but they are also spending a ton of money on exploration and drilling. What would probably help stabilise the price of gasoline is if we expanded the number and capacity of the tank farms we use to store gasoline and oil. But that would require spending money on things that don't actually increase production.
The way things are, if there is any kind of hiccup in the production, transport, refining, or distribution of gasoline, it is going to create a pinch in the supply and that is going to result in a price spike. I suspect all these large fluctuations we see in the price of gasoline is all on the retail side, that is, after it leaves the refinery. (Update: now that I think about it a little more, the retail side might exacerbate these price swings, but they probably start on the production side.)
* I read a post not too long ago (can't remember where) about how the cost saving measures and improved efficiency (that businesses have been striving to implement) have reduced the robustness of our supply chains. When everything runs smoothly, it's great, but it also means that anytime there is a glitch the whole machine is liable to crash to a halt. So the large fluctuations in the price of gasoline might just be those efficiency chickens coming home to roost.
Inside a fake un-trippable circuit breaker.
bigclivedotcom
A couple of months ago I was looking for the National Electrical Code. This is what most every state and local code is based on, and when I tracked it down I found it was under the purview of the Fire Marshall. This surprised me because I always considered the biggest risk from electrical circuits was electricity, I mean that stuff can kill you. But no. It's fairly easy to protect yourself from electricity, just don't touch anything electrical.
But fire, that's another issue. Electrical wiring is embedded throughout all of our buildings and overloaded circuits can get hot, hot enough to start a fire which is why we have circuit breakers and fuses. Since these circuits are buried within the structure of the building it may not be apparent until the fire is well underway.
So when I came across the title of this video I was triggered, to borrow a phrase from our universe of nitwit-icisms. Big Clive takes a somewhat sarcastic approach to the design of this breaker, and that's fine for people who understand these things. For everyone else, let me just be perfectly clear:
Un-trippable circuit breakers are a life threatening hazard
Anyone who designs, makes, sells or installs these devices is a criminal of the lowest kind. This kind of behavior deserves the death penalty.
The news articles only say that the breakers are counterfeit, they don't say whether they were actually working breakers or whether they were completely bogus like the breakers in the video. I suspect that a fairly large proportion of people have no interest in, or understanding of, circuit breakers. The fact that they are counterfeit is a simple method of proving the crime. Counterfeiting is a well understood phenomena. Counterfeiters print fake money and that's obviously a crime. Factories in Asia turn out all kinds of counterfeit fashion items. That's more cheating than a serious crime, well, at least in my book, but then I'm not a fashionista. But that's the point the law turns on, so that's what they used.
Occasionally an issue will come up around the house and I will declare that 'we have standards'. They may be arbitrary or capricious, but they are our standards and we are going to stick to them, or at least try. Electrical standards are something that are easy to evade and in many instances no one will notice and no harm will result, but it's not worth the risk. It's like putting on a seat belt every time you get in the car. Yes, it's a bit of a nuisance, but you never know when lightning might strike, so follow the rules. A zillion people have died proving those rules.
This must be the month for electronic gizmos. Older son has been amassing a collection of movies on Blu-ray disks. While Netflix and other streaming services offer a wide variety of movies, there are some very good movies that are only available on disks. I have a DVD player, but a simple DVD player won't play Blu-ray disks, so I bit the bullet and ordered the above LG player from Amazon.
Hooking it up wasn't too bad. I t was made easier by the fact that my wife had cleaned out the bottom shelf of the console so I was able to relocate the power strip from the tangled snarl of cables underneath the cabinet onto this shelf.
Remote Controls. Clockwise from upper left: Cable box, Roku, TV, DVD player, Blu-ray player. The silver one in the center is for the HDMI switch.
Now I'm trying to sort out all these gizmos so I get out the remote controls. Criminently, there are a bunch of them.
And that's how we were able to watch Tenetlast night.
The Fez
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
When I was working on the SatisFAXion fax modem at Intel about a zillion years ago, Mustafa Ataturk was one of our code phrases. I never found out why. I remember hearing something about the Fez being banned in Turkey, but I didn't realize it was such a powerful symbol. Anyway, this video shows you that while the winds of change are constantly blowing, their direction is also always changing. Hmm, makes politics sound like the weather.
We have a contender for the title of 'ultimate action hero'. James Bond has been that guy the last zillion years but now we've got the protagonist. Seriously, that's what they call him in the movie. The movie has everything you expect from a James-Bond-level movie: exotic locations, the beautiful femme fatale, super high-tech machines and gizmos, close ups on large scale, modern industrial settings in action, and let's not forget the crazy evil villain and his cadre of henchmen.
There's maybe a little more philosophising than is really necessary, but there's plenty of action so it's fun to watch. But don't try and figure out what's going on. It's just going to make your head hurt.
So there's this theory that while most of the universe is moving forward through time, it might be possible for particles to exist that move backwards in time. Possibly no more than someone working through a set of equations and arriving at a statement that time is equal to the square root of a number. Now everyone knows that time moves forward, so we only use the positive result. But what if the negative result was also real? Then would time be running backwards? So take that to a mad scientist with unlimited funds and he turns it into an industrial process. Put anything into one of these circular room-sized chambers and when they come out time is running backwards for them.
So now we have a bunch of fights going on between guys who are running forward in time and those who are running backwards in time. Two guys see each other and they want to catch each other. Our time forward guy runs toward the backward's time guy. The backward's guy appears to forward guy as if he is running backwards. Turn it around and the same thing will happen to the backward's guy: he will see forward's guy running backwards. Will they ever connect? If the catch happens in the forward guy's future, then it has already happened in the backward guy's past, so we won't see him in the chase. i.e. if we see them faced off, running, they haven't and they won't catch each other. That's all I'm going to say about that.
We get see lot's action with cars, bullets and explosives being done in reverse motion. That and the whole James Bond vibe makes it worth the price of admission.
