Near Me – ????????????

Near Me

Sure, it looks like a possessed doll, but if you can’t have a real pet cat a robotic one might work for you. These should be out some time in August for about $350US (apx.). If this is like the Sony Aibo, it will take a data card but you don’t want to think of where it goes, if you know what I mean…
It walks, makes cat noises, looks like it will play with you, and will sit on a chair and blankly stare out a window for hours and hours just like a real cat does. If you ask me, a robot cat is a much better gadget than a robot dog. You expect a dog to be bounding all over the place at the drop of a hat. Getting a robot to do that is tough, you need to plug it into the wall or it will have a 10 min. run time. A cat on the other hand is in a perpetual natural power saving mode. Brilliant!

Near Me Robotic Cat
Video of the cat in action
(robot,cat,Sega,Japan)

Dead Computer

Today my main desktop PC died. I was using it this morning and all of a sudden it just stopped. I smelled the un mistakable oder of cooking parts and I knew that something has failed in there. Upon examination I realized that the power supply kicked the bucket. No problem, I have two cases that are not being used so I swapped one out at lunch. I powered it up and started to finish up what I had started in the morning and left to go back to the office. I came home and found that the PC was, for lack of a better word, stuck. It was like it was trying to boot but just could not do it. Power was on, lights were on, but no video and the DVD would blink every once in a while. I swapped the power supply out a second time and tried to boot the system but all I got was more burning part smell. So I’m very annoyed by all of this, I can’t scan my slides, edit video, or do anything that requires some computing oomph. My laptop is a 1 GHz Celeron with XP on it so even typing causes the system to drag. Anyone want to make a donation so I can get some new hardware?

(dead,computer)

Space Elevator

Space Elevator

I hope that one of these gets built before I die. Anything that will get mass out of the gravity well is a good thing. Something like this could make space travel a reality for just about anybody.

The Space Elevator Reference brought to you by SpaceRef
Space.com – The Space Elevator Comes Closer to Reality
Wired – To the moon in a space elevator?
NASA – Audacious & Outrageous: Space Elevators

(space elevator,science)