Too cute.

Thanks to dduane, here is a video of a Cat and Chicken: friends for life.

Prototype Robotic Pack Mule.

I'd heard that the US army was developing a robotic pack mule (Warning: video is loud) to help soldiers carry heavy equipment into battle zones, over rough terrain, but I hadn't seen any videos of it till now. It seems good at keeping its ballance, now if only they could get it to stop mincing around.

The Singularity is Near

I'm now something like 4/5th of the way through "The Singularity is Near" and I'm now getting to the dubious parts. So far, I haven't seen anything startlingly new. I was a bit surprised that we now had a good model of how the brain performs auditory processing in humans, but that was about it. Most of the other new technology he mentions, I was already well aware of.

We're now at the point in the book where he's trying to predict what our civilzation will do once its several trillion times smarter than it is now. Two words: No Hope. I think he realizes it too, since he does keep throwing in disclaimers about our current limited understanding of any number of things. So, this is the point where I'm starting to disagree with him on a number of points. But they're mostly things where we just don't have enough information and he thinks one thing is more likely, and I think another is.

At the rate I'm going, I should finish the book in another week.

Why Privacy is Important.

I have a simple reason for not installing the Googlebar or anything else that reports my search habits to them. I just discovered, while looking through my search history, that at some point I did a search for "strap-on penguin". Imagine the harm that information could do me if it were made public.
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Edit: D'OH!