robot mania

[chimerically]

My life's been invaded by robots. It all started with dag29580863 getting a robotic dog last fall, when he was still at IBM. At the time he was exploring cognitive computing and was hoping to use it for something involving that, but when he moved to Google it came home with him.

Then I got him a Lego Mindstorms NXT kit for xmas. We've played around with ideas of building a ballroom-dancing robot and a thermostat robot with it. This quarter, in Cliff Nass's lab, I'm working with a team doing studies on human-robot interaction ... and as part of an experiment we're running on attachment to robots, I borrowed dag29580863's kit back and built and programmed some robots to use in the study. (Yeah, I'm a terrible gift-giver in this case. "Here's a present! Now I'm going to play with it ..." I also feel like I'm back in undergraduate computer science in that I'm pulling all-nighters figuring out the advanced programming features of the NXT.) I've also talked to several friends who are doing research on various robots, including a fascinating project on the Mars Rover missions.

Finally, after recent allergy tests revealed that I am, in fact, allergic to lots of things (surprise surprise), yesterday we ordered a roomba that should arrive next week that should help us keep our place cleaner and less allergy-inducing.

I feel like my life's being taken over by robots! What will be next? Maybe I can incorporate these recent forays into robotics into my final paper for my (fabulous and fascinating) phenomenology class, just to continue the trend. :~) Or I can program a robot to sew ballroom dresses for me. (I'm trying to finish up two dresses for the performance I have this Saturday.)

Any other robots I should know about out there? Can they invade my life even more?

(P.S. Isn't this sewing userpic cool? I can't remember where I found it, but for many sewing machines are so opaque and this is just a great graphic for understanding what's really going on.)

Comments

[neilfred.livejournal.com]

The stitch that sewing machines do is obviously topologically impossible -- so when I first learned to sew, I stared at the mechanism, advancing it slowly, for quite a while to convince myself that it really can work. But even having done that, it's still so clearly not possible that I always forget how it works, and so I have re-figured it out several more times since then. I therefore have come to realize that in fact I am right that it's not possible, and the truth is that sewing machines are magical -- and those times when I convince myself otherwise, it's just part of how the spell is designed to confuse those who get too close to it.

So clearly this animated gif is a sign that the "sewing machines aren't magical" conspiracy has come into the internet age.

[chimerically.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, it's just to mislead us with a false sense of rationalism. Sewing machines are really still as mystical as ever.