battlebots, iron chef edition

Things I Didn't Know About Robots

This picture is of robotic birds that tweet when you, well, tweet. Programmed to correlate with user names or hashtags, they fly up and down when a post by them or referencing them appears. The projected tree branch backdrop also runs a script showing you the tweets as they come in. The ITP program at NYU is so cool... and my friend Josh who helped design the tweeting birds did a fabulous job. It only took me like 9 months to post this.

In other news...

My mother sent me an article from Discover Magazine online: 20 Things You Didn't Know About Robots. My favorite things I didn't know about robots turned out to be these:

14 Chris Melhuish of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory created robots that use bacteria-filled fuel cells to produce electricity from rotten apples and dead flies. The goal: robots that forage for their own food.

15 Mini Me: Australian researchers are trying to build a microrobot that would mimic the swim stroke used by E. coli bacteria. It would be injected into a patient so it could take a biopsy from the inside.

IPGs Emerging Media Lab Pet Robots

Visited the EML the other day... Here were their pet robots:

nobody puts robocop in the corner!

ladies & gentlemen, mrs. c3p0

your grandfather's robot - an heirloom!

let sleeping robot dogs lie

master of all he surveys

random robot imagery

robots drawing at the ITP show several months back

crazy plastic, seemingly robotic mannequins, lit from within, in portland, or

robot messenger bag in soho reading toilet paper printouts

writing robot

image courtesy loganloganlogan

so slate seems to be doing a whole series about movies. it's summertime after all and we do like our summer blockbusters, right? i've seen exactly one: Star Trek. it was delicious.

but it turns out that 'formulaic' movies have a founding father. Wycliffe A. Hill took 36 archetypal figures and combined them with 36 archetypal situations (adding one of his own, "A miracle happens") to come up with 10 million plot concepts. i am so getting my hands on a copy of this.

when others entered the fray, however, developing their own stock plots, Hill took it a step beyond - he made a scriptwriting robot. it would write an outline for a script in 20 minutes. somehow this did not take off, despite the excellent name, "Shakespeare's Ghost." to see an ad for this brilliant piece of mechanized hackery, check this out.

robots twitter, too

so now i'm following @r2d2 on twitter, and i enjoy his tweets. even if i don't really understand them.

but there are other, far less clever and endearing robots on twitter...

via Mashable:

6. You are a robot

---

You are not really a person at all. You are a bot. I’m a science fiction fan. I’m all for the rights of robots and all that, but in the world we live in bots are not exactly the highly developed neural networks that will eventually take over the world as predicted by the Singularity or the Terminator series of films. For now, if you just use Twitter to promote content that is produced elsewhere and that process is automated, then you just might be a robot.

@NYTimes - All the news that’s fit to Tweet. Yeah, I said it.

@CNN - Cable news channel embracing and succeeding on Twitter.

@Newsweek - A national magazine trying to reinvent itself. Stories are fed into a Twitter stream.

Flight of the Conchords

saw them tonight at radio city music hall. brilliant.