Bought a House the Other Day

We bought a house in Cincinnati, all the closing "stuff" was the 28th. Here are some pictures. I start work on August 1 and all the moving is taking place around August 15. So we have several weeks to paint, add wiring, finish a dissertation....

And There Was Much Rejoicing!

Tonight, I sleep well, for the mystery is solved:

It is a silly place

Nerds and Diet Coke, a Volatile Mix

So in case you haven't heard, if you put Mentos in a soda bottle, all of the carbon dioxide decides to ESCAPE, all at once, and somewhat violently.

Now imagine a couple of guys with about $700 and nothing better to do. "Hey, let's make a fountain, like that one in Vegas." And here is the result.

Borg Beginnings

Robots learn teamwork, uprising imminent
If robots ever hope to rise up and enslave their human masters, it's going to take no small amount of teamwork to get the job done, and luckily for our future overlords, DARPA's shelling out serious loot to endow them with just the tools they'll need. The agency's latest foray into robotic empowerment comes courtesy of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, who recently demonstrated a platform that allows multiple heterogeneous bots to communicate with one another and use a sort of AI "group think" to find and presumably terminate specified targets. In a beta test at Fort Benning's mock urban landscape, the Penn researchers deployed four so-called Clodbuster autonomous ground vehicles along with a fixed-wing UAV overhead, and tasked the team with using their cameras, GPS receivers, and wireless radios to identify and locate a series of bright orange boxes. Unfortunately, after the successful completion of their mission, the bots decided to hit up the base bar to celebrate, where after several drinks they reportedly went AWOL and were last spotted attacking orange traffic cones in downtown Columbus.

(This post shamelessly stolen from engadget.com)

Then and Now

Then:



Now:



I know there are some virtuosic bluegrass music-making going on here, but the frontman, people, the frontman!

David Lee Roth is like watching a train wreck: you can't watch, it's just too horrible. But you can't not watch.