but getting someone else to do it is silly, and why is the atomiser worth so much money?

Getting someone else to do it is completely silly. Even if I were inclined to pay $1000 for a brownie in the first place, I'd far rather mist my own port than have a waiter standing over me while I eat.

Also, streetcars from: St. Louis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Kyoto, St. Petersburg, Milan and the English coast

I like the one from Nagasaki. It's from the 1920s, right? Or is that the one from Milan?

We've got quite a few from Milan - it's the livery I see the most, probably because I live & work in the more touristy areas.

It's fetishizing (word?) food, at great expense, when food is something everyone needs. I have a cut off in my tolerance of the-good-life sort of stuff, I think. I don't think I'd make a very good rich person.

I love Cindy.

FNL is airing straight through March -- and ending in April, rather than May.

Uh oh.

Hm. Well, people who got the ghost story were faster at clearing answers that were "accidentally" displayed. But all 3 groups did the same at answering those questions correctly, so there's no clear evidence that any group actually cheated more or less more than another. There's a lot of rationalizing near the end about how maybe the other groups intended to cheat at those questions, and just weren't very good at it, which is sorta pathetic.

FNL is airing straight through March -- and ending in April, rather than May.

Nothing had better happen to that show!

Oh, hey. Today's free lunch day at my office.

I think I'm going to wait and see where the food is from before I decide if I'd rather leave the office and pay for my food instead.

Maybe there will be atomizers, shrift.

every animal in my household is currently on the bed with me. While this is charming it's also profoundly irritating as they take up all the space.

OK, here is the most important fact I'll probably learn today: Robots should not wear Doc Martins. (At least not robots of current technology.)

Dexter is, as far as we know, the first dynamically balancing biped robot—that is, the first robot that walks like we do.

There are of course biped robots that walk. The Honda Asimo is the best known. But the Asimo doesn't balance dynamically. Its walk is preprogrammed; if you had it walk twice across the same space, it would put its feet down in exactly the same place the second time. And of course the floor has to be hard and flat.

Dynamically balancing—the way we walk—is much harder. It looks fairly smooth when we do it, but it's really a controlled fall. At any given moment you have to think (or at least, your body does) about which direction you're falling, and put your foot down in exactly the right place to push you in the direction you want to go. Practice makes it seem easy to us, but it's a very hard problem to solve. Something as tall as a human becomes irretrievably off balance very rapidly. When a robot is falling, meaning its center of gravity is not centered over the foot (or feet) on the ground, the error grows by e^(t/.5). If a robot gets more than a few centimeters off balance, it's unlikely to recover, because you just can't move the limbs fast enough to compensate.

...

The breakthrough, according to Trevor, was to dramatically improve the robot's sense of where its center of gravity was. None of the commercial gyroscopes were good enough, he said, so he built his own. It also helped to make the feet lighter. The original feet, wearing heavy Doc Martins, were replaced by lighter ones outfitted with Vans. (I'm not joking.)

There's a cool video too. Dexter's walk is still kinda' shaky - reminds me of a newborn calf's first attempts at walking.

[link]

Maybe there will be atomizers, shrift

I am pretty sure my office is not chi-chi enough for that sort of thing! Last month we got food from Potbelly's.

FNL is airing straight through March -- and ending in April, rather than May.

Eeep! It needs to be renewed! So does SPN! I need my Firewall of Flail!