Honda Robot Controlled By Brain Waves

File under HOW COOL IS THAT?!?!?

Honda Robot Controlled By Brain Waves: "Dotnaught writes 'Honda researchers to have developed a way to control robots using human brain waves. Using brain signals read from a person in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, a robotic hand mirrored the movement of the human controller, spreading its fingers and making a 'V' sign.'

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Leaking Space

Interesting perspective from William Gibson's blog...
LEAKING SPACE: "BLDGBLOG: How are these shifts being accounted for in the geopolitical and military analyses you mentioned earlier?

MIKE DAVIS: The problem that military planners, and some geopoliticians, are talking about is actually something quite different: that’s the emergence, in hundreds of both little and major nodes across the world, of essentially autonomous slums governed by ethnic militias, gangs, transnational crime, and so on. This is something the Pentagon is obviously very interested in, and concerned about, with Mogadishu as a kind of prototype example. The ongoing crisis of the Third World city is producing almost feudalized patterns of large slum neighborhoods that are effectively terrorist or criminal mini-states – rogue micro-sovereignties. That’s the view of the Pentagon and of Pentagon planners. They also seem quite alarmed by the fact that the peri-urban slums – the slums on the edges of cities – lack clear hierarchies. Even more difficult, from a planning perspective, there’s very little available data. The slums are kind of "

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)

Stanley Kunitz died May 14 at the age of 100. His collected poems reached me deeply and I carry his words with me daily. This is not the same planet it was Saturday.

Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation
by Stanley Kunitz

Since that first morning when I crawled
into the world, a naked grubby thing,
and found the world unkind,
my dearest faith has been that this
is but a trial: I shall be changed.
In my imaginings I have already spent
my brooding winter underground,
unfolded silky powdered wings, and climbed
into the air, free as a puff of cloud
to sail over the steaming fields,
alighting anywhere I pleased,
thrusting into deep tubular flowers.

It is not so: there may be nectar
in those cups, but not for me.
All day, all night, I carry on my back
embedded in my flesh, two rows
of little white cocoons,
so neatly stacked
they look like eggs in a crate.
And I am eaten half away.

If I can gather strength enough
I'll try to burrow under a stone
and spin myself a purse
in which to sleep away the cold;
though when the sun kisses the earth
again, I know I won't be there.
Instead, out of my chrysalis
will break, like robbers from a tomb,
a swarm of parasitic flies,
leaving my wasted husk behind.

Sir, you with the red snippers
in your hand, hovering over me,
casting your shadow, I greet you,
whether you come as an angel of death
or of mercy. But tell me,
before you choose to slice me in two:
Who can understand the ways
of the Great Worm in the Sky?

Happy Science

According to Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist, his research indicates that the happiness you feel about good things that happen to you lasts longer when you don't have an explanation for it. His book, Stumbling upon Happiness, sounds fascinating. Dig the NPR Day-to-day article on it if you're interested.

Lily Allen Your ears will thank me!

Psssst!

Preposterous Horseshit.

Pass it on!