Month: February 2002

Salman Rushdie tells it like

Salman Rushdie tells it like it is. This is from the Feb. 4th New York Times. America and Anti-Americans: “Those elements in the Arab and Muslim world who blame America for their own feelings of political impotence are feeling more impotent than ever…. What America is accused of — closed- mindedness, stereotyping, ignorance — is also what its accusers would see if they looked into a mirror.” Ouch.

Fun with robots: IEEE Spectrum

Fun with robots: IEEE Spectrum is featuring an article about modular robots. The Rambles news staff spotted this one a year ago, but apparently they’ve invested some real money in a robot that can pull itself together like a slime mold out of lots of tiny other robots and move one of four completely different ways. Take this very far, and it can become creepy pretty fast… robot bugs that crawl under the door, up the walls, through the sewers, and then they assemble into one giant kickass monster robot. I smell a bad movie.

Now I’m sending you this

Now I’m sending you this message through the courtesy of Blogger Pro ™, a steal at $35 a year. It’s finally got a feature that I’ve been waiting a long time for… using the “draft” option, you don’t have to publish everything that you’ve posted if you don’t want to. You can even post into the future. Love it! I’m happy to pay and hope that Evan Williams gets a nice business going with Blogger. It’s a great service.

Steve Grand wants to be

Steve Grand wants to be a “latter-day Baron Frankenstein” according to this New York Times article on artificial life: Man Who Would Be God: Giving Robots Life. He comes across in the article as a genuine latter-day eccentric Englishman, the clever kind, not the unbalanced kind. He’s written a book about his adventures creating artificial life (Creation : Life and How to Make It). The thing that sets him apart from other a-life hobbyists is that he’s written a bone-fide game bestseller that’s based on a-life. Called Creatures, it’s popular enough to give him the money he needs to fund more ambitious research. It’s exciting to think that a-life is now self-sustaining in terms of revenue, even if it’s not very advanced yet.