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!

Gawker on the Bruni review of the Penthouse restaurant: [link]

Now I have to go to my probably two hour, possibly three hour staff meeting. Awesome.

Somehow a sandwich place called Potbelly's seems way to appropriate for me right now.

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)

I need to know more. There are a few "universal constants" (the world is as so until I say no) I'm trying to get across to my krav students, and being balanced is a biggie. It's surprising (and yet not) how many times I have to point out that if your head isn't at least within the floor area marked by your stance, you're not properly stable. Mathy stuff? Will make me seem even more right, even if none of us understand it.

Potbelly's is rather nummy. Between them and Quiznos, I never go to Subway anymore.

how many times I have to point out that if your head isn't at least within the floor area marked by your stance, you're not properly stable.

Next time someone is standing in an unstable fashion, say, "Dude, you don't want your error to grow by e^(t/.5), do you?"