CMU’s Biorobotics Lab have build a modular robotic snake. It can climb trees and spy on you. Air penguins, Robotuna, and now this? The robot uprising may have already started.
Update: Oh brilliant, they’re letting robots take over the hospitals. That will really help our side the robot war.
That’s about as wise as fitting jumbojets with kind of automated piloting device that could mindless fly itself straight into the side of a mountain or a skyscraper. wait a minute, oh shi..
These cute little beasties are biting each other and getting face cancer in the process. Cedric appeared to have natural immunity, so scientists at U. Tasmania deliberately infected him. Sadly, he wasn’t immune so they put him down. But they’re hoping he hasn’t died in vain.
A couple of years ago Noah Scalin decided to make a years worth of skull artworks. That’s 365 days of skulls. If you’ve got the time, it’s worth looking through the whole project because it is an artwork in its own right.
Needless to say it was very popular and Noah is happy to be typecast as the skull artist. Occasionally, he adds a few more skulls to his ouvre. Above you can see Skull #379. Commissioned by the Mütter museum, he built it out of a bunch of lucite brain blocks they happened to have lying around. Follow the link to find out more about his skull of brains.
Once again Finland comes first in the annual slightly silly game of which country is the best. This time around Newsweek have produced a neat little interactive infographic to summarise all the rankings. Countries are ranked on five dimensions (education, health, quality of life, economics and politics) These numbers are summed together to give the overall score.
Naturally, it is a just a number but in the field of education at least i don’t think it is any coincidence that Finland consistently beats the rest of the world on all measures of educational excellence. One of the most inspiring talks I’ve ever heard was on this subject. Given by Pekka Räsänen, Niilo Mäki Institute, University of Jyväskylä, Finland to a meeting of the UCL Centre for Educational Neuroscience, he mostly discussed how to bring children with learning disabilities into the system but started his talk with a little bit of boasting about Finnish education.
1. Finnish children start school at seven years old.
2. Educational spending per student is low but results are phenomonal
3. There are no programs for gifted children. Likewise children with learning disabilities are mostly taught in mainstream classes.
4. Class sizes often approach 30.
5. There is no postcode lottery nor any private schools. Children go to their nearest school.
6. There is a core curriculum but teachers have huge freedom about how they teach it.
7. Being a teacher is a respected profession and most teachers have a master’s degree.
(I am not an educationalist but) I’ve long thought that annual league tables and overly rigid national curriculum rules are very deterimental to the goals they are intended to promote. Finland seems like good evidence in favour of this. If there’s any more evidence out there, i would like to see it.
The great thing about joggin’ in a place you don’t know is that you don’t know where you are going so you don’t worry so much about how far you’ve run and you have lots of new scenery to distract you. Plus if you get lost you have to go that much further.. I went out for a 30 min run round a park in Dijon and ended up on a 12km meander round Dijon, Longvic and many other points.
If only Lambeth had such scenic (and flat) places to get lost in, I might run a little more
PostSecret is my new favourite blog. Not that my puny clicks will add much to the354,708,351 they already have. Which makes me realise that this is yet another meme that i arrived late for. Or maybe, I came early and have conveniently forgotten the fact. Anyway, I’m having fun, that’s the main thing.
Paste some of your writing into the box on this site and they’ll tell you which author your style or vocabluary most resembles. It’s very frustrating that they don’t give any details of how they decide it or what stats they are performing. And it would be nice to have a number quantifying how alike they find you. You could the plot your position to a given uncertainty in L-space.
Who needs an octopus to demonstrate publication bias? The door of my spare room has pretty good track record so far. Although, it is more of a psychic bouncer than a sports pundit. If I paint your name on it, it’s safe to say you’ll never move in. Shortly before Nadja was due to move in, I painted her name on the door of what was to be her study. A few weeks later she dumped me for the very last time.
One year later my brother Max was due to move in for a few months while he acclimatised to that there London. To welcome him, Nadja was airbrushed from history and his name went up on the door. That was 2 january 2009, he was later that week. In fact, he took about another 5 months to get to London but then stayed north of the river.
Just in case you’re not yet impressed, the psychic door did not prevent two temporary visitors from staying. The daughter of one my mum’s friends stayed for a week. Her name wasn’t down so she was allowed in. Then Adrian moved in. He had to put with me for a flatmate and having to cram a house full of stuff into that tiny space, so if anyone earned the right to have their name painted on the door it would have been him. But it wasn’t and he stayed for 6 months.
Finally, two months ago Tessa dumped me. Not out of the blue but very suddenly and very abruptly. After much begging, blubbing, pleading and pestering, she did agree to a stay of execution. A trial partial separation. We were engaged and I believed (and still do) that we could eventually have lived happily ever after. So this seemed like a great test for the psychic door. So she was painted inexpertly on the door in magnetic paint no less.
What’s more it would be a psychic insurance policy. If she moved in, I’d win eternal happiness. If she didn’t, I would have ever more proof of my doors magical properties.
Needless to say, it now appears she will never, ever give me another chance and I am the proud owner of a portal into the world of black magic. I feel like Tom Baker’s voodoo artist in the Vault of Horror.
The really interesting experiment would be to write my OWN name on the door…
