Our campus just received a letter from the enforcing arm of the RIAA which described, down to the IP address, BitTorrent downloads of copyrighted movies.
Mythbusters is back!
One of our favorite shows here at Street Tech Labs last year was Mythbusters. It’s a Discovery Channel offering where two geeks set up elaborate experiments to test out the voracity of common urban myths.
Can your ass be so large that it forms a seal over a toilet bowl such that you can’t get off and the toilet needs to be broken to break said seal? The Mythbusters built a giant latex ass to find out. Apparently it’s a myth. Big ass. No seal.
Is it possible for a can of dinner roll dough to explode all over the back seat of a car on a really hot day (such that the driver thinks she’s been shot and the sticky stuff on the back of her head is her own brainmatter)? Yes! They tried it and proved it could theoretically happen.
A new season of this seriously fun geekly goodness starts tomorrow night (Friday) at 9pm on Discovery.
Robosapien Robot Toy
Mark Tilden, BEAMbot guru, who now works for Wowwee Toys in Hong Kong, has a new robot toy that should be on store shelves for the holidays. Called the Robosapien, this is the first walking humanoid design that Tilden’s done (as far as we know). One would assume it’s based on some of the same BEAM-like principles that Tilden used in his other Wowwee toys, such as the B.I.O.-Bugs and the Beastland Dragons. Solarbotics has a gallery of progress images and some motion studies of the Robosapien.
Servo Magazine
The venerable magazine of record for wireheads and hardware hackers everywhere, Nuts & Volts, is about to launch a new mag called Servo, dedicated to robotics. Nuts & Volts has always had strong coverage of robotics and embedded systems, and has done magazine supplements on amateur robotics, so given their beat and the growing popularity of all things bot, this spin-off mag is a natural. The first issue is due on newstands next month. If you sign up as a charter subscriber, you get three issues free. Hopefully, Nuts & Volts can succeed where others, like Robot Science and Technology, have failed. Sure seems like the time is right for such a publication.