July 21, 2010
The Artic Circle: Random Cities in Mainland China: Hong Kong International Airport:
July 21, 2010
There is no excuse for buying McDonald’s in Hong Kong. But I did, and I will try to explain. My first night in Hong Kong led me, quite randomly, to the best Chinese food I’ve ever eaten, hands down. So good, in fact, that I have gone back to the same place twice since, and tried to make nice with the wait staff there. The fact that this place is right around the corner from a row of strip clubs has nothing to do with my frequenting this establishment. Honestly. I’ve also tried other places, with mixed results. I am currently convinced that I don’t really like the taste of Chinese barbecue; it is sweet and gummy in a way that just doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve also decided that I don’t really like rice noodles either; again, its mostly a texture thing. I’ve been on the look out for some fresh sea food, but no luck so far. This is high on my list of priorities for the weekend. I’ve run into a lot of sushi places, but since I’ll be in Tokyo in a few weeks I want to save my appetite for the real deal. The point is that its not from a lack of trying new things. I’ve become quite bold at stepping inside small, steamy restaurants, pointing randomly at the menu, and hoping for the best. Although the city is designed to be bilingual, I’ve found myself in a number of situations interacting with people can’t speak more than a few words of English, and so it is a crap shoot every time. I’ve also started working a lot, and running into the city to try new food isn’t always an option. I’ve gone hungry a few nights from just working past the time when […]
July 21, 2010
This is a robot going poo: The robot in question is Ecobot III, which contains a fully functional digestive system capable of ingesting biomass, turning it into energy, and then excreting waste, graphically demonstrated in the above video. The actual digesting is done by a series of microbial fuel cells (MFCs), where bacteria chow down and produce hydrogen atoms as a byproduct. The hydrogen goes into a fuel cell, which generates electricity to power the robot plus pure water, which the robot then drinks to keep itself from getting dehydrated. The remaining biomass goes through the entire cycle once more, and then it’s, um, purged: Director of Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Chris Melhuish, said MFCs had been tried before but an artificial gut was needed to solve the problem of previous models, which was that humans had to clean up the waste left by bacterial digestion. Melhuish said the robot was called Ecobot III, but admitted “diarrhea-bot would be more appropriate, as it’s not exactly knocking out rabbit pellets.” The difference between Ecobot and other robots that use biomass for fuel (like EATR) is that Ecobot digests things to produce energy rather than burning them to generate heat to boil water to create steam to produce energy. Thanks to its bellyfull of microbes, Ecobot is actually able to digest things, and this makes it much more adaptable when it comes to sources of fuel, since it’s able to run on stuff that doesn’t burn, like waste water. Yes, this robot not only poos, it could potentially be powered by poo. At the moment, Ecobot III is only 1% efficient, and while it’s technically capable of operating for several days completely on its own, it can’t really do much in that time. After the jump, watch Ecobot II (a fully armed and […]
July 20, 2010
The Singularity Summit is scheduled for August 14-15 here in SF, and if you’re interested in seeing what the future might be like (without just waiting until it gets here), a bunch of smart people will happily tell you their thoughts on what might be in store for us as a species. Speakers include Ray Kurzweil (of course), James Randi, Dr. Irene Pepperberg, David Hanson of Hanson Robotics, and many more. So, what’s “The Singularity?” See it on a graph, after the jump. The Singularity represents an “event horizon” in the predictability of human technological development past which present models of the future may cease to give reliable answers, following the creation of strong AI or the enhancement of human intelligence. The general argument here is that the increase in computing power is a predictable trend, and if you extend that trend out into the future, you can see how long it takes until human brains become pretty much useless in the face of overwhelming artificial intelligence, at which point things are going to get totally crazy. And keep in mind that that graph is also taking cost into account, so according to the predicted trend (which is based on data from the past and present), by 2050 or so $1000 will buy you a computer that can out-calculate our entire race. Every second. Pretty wild stuff. [ The Singularity Summit 10 ]
July 15, 2010
Before I left the states I went to Best Buy and bought a converter for Hong Kong electrical outlets (which, for the record, are exactly the same as those in Great Britian). When I got into my room and plugged it in, the power bar for my laptop started buzzing and chirping, and then started flashing green lights. I totally fried the cord, leaving me with a drained laptop battery and a useless hunk of silicon with all my valuables on it. Luckily, the converter worked just fine for my phone, which has been doing the majority of my computing work along with the complimentary laptop (running IE7 (not 6, still sucks) and a Chinese version of Vista that I can’t navigate for the life of me). My phone kicks so much ass it isn’t funny, the battery lasts forever even when I am using it hard, and it is basically the only thing keeping me sane. Bestest purchase ever. Which is why I broke down in a panic the last time I went into the city. My plan was to buy a power cord for my laptop from the Computer Center in Mong Kok, and a sim card for my phone so it would actually work as a phone and not just a mini tablet, without paying the absurd international roaming rates AT&T chrages. Seriously, AT&T charges $15/megabyte for international usage. I use, on average, 1.5 gigs of data a month, not including all the time I am at home on wifi. That means normal usage would cost me over $22,500 a month. Just slightly below my yearly gross income. At the MTR station in Hang Hau was a PCCW kiosk (a major phone and internet/wifi provider for the city) charging reasonable rates for a sim card, so I […]
July 15, 2010
The Mars Science Laboratory rover, aka Curiosity, is currently undergoing assembly and testing. Scheduled for a 2011 launch, Curiosity is way bigger, and capable of a lot more science, than either little Sojourner or not-so-little Opportunity (which is still going, by the way). It must be pretty stressful to be an engineer working on MSL, knowing that at some point you just have to say, “okay, looks good” and then the robot takes off for Mars and there’s nothing more you can do, ever. And for better or worse, Spirit and Opportunity have set some pretty high (I’m not sure whether to say “unrealistic”) standards for durability and performance. I’m optimistic, though, and as long as the crazy landing scheme works out, MSL has tons of potential. Video of the robotic “skycrane” that’ll set Curiosity down on the surface of Mars, after the jump. [ MSL ]
July 14, 2010
A few years ago, DARPA teamed up with a company called Arteriocyte to research methods for manufacturing blood without an actual donor on-hand, and whaddya know — a million and change tax dollars later, here we are. You no doubt remember stem cells. Well, they’re back in a major way (did they really ever leave?), and this time instead of clogging up the Supreme Court’s backlog they’re helping manufacture blood that is “functionally indistinguishable” from the real type-O. “Pharmed” blood (their word, not ours) will eventually be a godsend for troops in the field, where fresh blood often takes three weeks to arrive from the source. But don’t cancel all your donor appointments just yet — eBlood (our word, not theirs) won’t be ready for human testing until 2013. And pints still cost more than a bottle of Johnny Walker’s finest — around $5,000, and that’s before they factor in the cookies and apple juice they gave the umbilical cord for its time and patience. DARPA has artificial blood; Cullen family stock upgraded to ‘buy’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink Physorg | source DARPA Defense Sciences Office | Email this | Comments
July 14, 2010
Last month, South Korea deployed an armed surveillance robot at a guard post within the demilitarized zone in Gangwon Province. The robot consists of an array of cameras and sensors plus a 40mm grenade launcher. Now, let’s be clear: this robot is remote controlled. It appears to have autonomous sensing and targeting capability, but it doesn’t fire autonomously… Rather, it can be fired remotely by a human. In this respect, it’s much the same as a Predator drone or a Talon SWORDS, except that it’s stationary. This approach is very efficient if you have a lot of static area to monitor, since many robots can be controlled by a small group of humans, with each robot only alerting its controllers if its sensors detect something relevant. Human soldiers would probably perform better at most aspects of the task, certainly, but humans are very expensive to train, equip and maintain, while each of these robots costs only $330,000. I managed to dig up a video from 2006 of what I’m pretty sure is the same basic robot; it’s in Korean, so if anyone can translate some of the interesting stuff, please post in the comments. If this trial proves successful, South Korea plans to deploy the robots at all guard posts along the DMZ, and possibly to some offshore islands. VIA [ Chosun ] POST NAVIGATION
July 13, 2010
By the time I was settled in my room, it was nearing 9pm. the minibusses run to campus until midnight, and the trains until 1am, so I didn’t have very long to look around. The closest MTR station to campus is Hang Hau, which is on the purple line way in the bottom right corner of the map. Hong Kong proper is on the island down the Blue Line, Kowloon is on the mainland and just sprawls on forever. I didn’t know where I was going, I had no plans whatsoever. I jumped on the train in Hang Hau, transferred to the Blue Line at North Point, and was planning to go all the way down to Central (downtown Hong Kong) and then walk back. The train was pretty much empty until I got to Causeway Bay, where a huge flood of people were waiting to get on the train. It reminded me of the Times Square subway stop, so I figured it was where I wanted to be as my first tourist experience. I jumped off the train, and was greeted with an endless row of lights and tiny shops and hundreds of people walking around. Food everywhere, sweltering hot humid air. This was the city, with flavors of Blade Runner or that scene in Attack of the Clones where they are chasing after the bounty hunter, but with this weird Joel Schumacher neon hideousness throughout. Lots of teenagers getting froyo or kebabs, lots of cars cruising around. I walked a bit north until I saw the water to get my bearings. There are several roads that run parallel to the water; I picked one a block south of the water that looked relatively lively and started walking west. I occassionally moved a block south or north, but kept […]
July 13, 2010
Being alone in this place has made me feel like a huge tourist, and I haven’t had the courage to go whole hog and snap pics of everything. Plus, I didn’t know how long my phone would last, and I didn’t have wifi anyway, so I kept my first trip fairly low tech. Future notes will definitely have pretty pictures. After a 15 hour plane ride, I had to negotiate the Hong Kong metro system to the University with luggage in tow. This required: Exchanging money at the airport. My rule of thumb is that US$1 = HK$8, roughly, but the airport was exchanging at a rate of 1 to 7, which sucks. But I knew I had some trains to catch and maybe a cab ride or two, plus I was starving, so I changed out 60 bucks, figuring that would get me around and fed for the night. Three train changes. There’s a special train from the airport into the city, and then a metro across the city, and another across the bay into Kowloon. A cab ride from the train station into the university. I had to do all this without a working phone, which is basically the only thing that keeps me alive on a daily basis. Luckily I saved a map of the university, and directions to my building; otherwise, I was depending on the public transportation system and the kindness of strangers. So first of all, the Hong Kong subway system is amazing. The trains are huge, maybe 50% wider than New York trains, they all have clear wifi signal (but have to pay for it, and I didn’t), and clear cell reception (half the people on the train were on their phones). The loudspeaker system was clear as a bell, the trains were […]
July 13, 2010
The DelFly II from TU Delft is one of the most promising flapping wing micro UAVs we’ve seen, and at the International Micro Air Vehicle Conference and Flight Competition last week the little MAV got quite a workout. The video shows the robot flying along with a feed from the onboard camera and some of the vision algorithms being used to navigate. Especially cool is how the DelFly II actually runs into a wall at one point and bounces right back, which is one of the big advantages of a flapping wing design over a rotary wing. Also, that optic flow navigation technique is something that we’ve written about before; it replicates the way that insects navigate, using simple moving patterns to determine speed and direction relative to objects. It’s not specified in the video what level of autonomy was used on the Delfly II… The competition permitted both full autonomy and remote control based on onboard video. At the very least, the first sequence (the figure eight around the two orange poles) seems to be completely autonomous, albeit (as far as I can tell) using a ground station to interpret the video and send steering commands to the robot. If you think 16 grams is pretty small for an autonomous robot, don’t forget the DelFly Micro, which weighs just a hair (literally) over 3 (!) grams, and also manages to carry an onboard camera that can transmit streaming video. The DelFly Nano (1.5 grams) still seems to be a work in progress, and as for the DelFly Pico, somebody at TU Delft sneezed nearby and now they can’t find it. Yeah, I was kidding about that last one. [ TU Delft ] [ IMAV 2010 ]
July 12, 2010
I watched a full episode of Chuck. There goes that New Year’s resolution. I was wrong about the flight path; the plane went North over the Hudson, just put its nose into the Artic Circle over Alaska, then back south through Russia into China. Didn’t see a single polar bear. I also watched Date Night (lame), How to Train your Dragon (lame), and parts of The Ghost Writer (fell asleep). Xanax When the Miley Cyrus vehicle “The Last Song” came on, I switched to the New Wave in-flight radio station. It was amazingly awesome, even though it repeated itself every hour. I made it a point to look around to see if any cute girls were nodding their head to New Order with me. No one was. Total completed Sudoku puzzles: 3 Total lectures planned: 5 (of 7) Seriously, Xanax. Especially because booze is free on international flights, and the combination is like cotton candy for adults. I spent about 6 hours of a 15 hour flight sleeping, and another three or so in a dopey haze picking at terrible food. I bought one of those neck pillows and slept like a (drunk, intoxicated) baby. All announcements on the plane were in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. I know how to say one word in both languages (Thank you in Cantonese is “doh tsay”, Hello in Mandarin is “ni hao”). I desperately tried to pick out these words from the flurry of language, but failed miserably. To be fair, I think the flight attendant who made the announcements in Mandarin had a speech impediment. In any case, I now know that thank you in Mandarin is “shi shi”. The other in flight station worth listening to was the pilot’s communication channel with ground control. I don’t know why they were broadcasting […]