IBMs Watson project has used AI techniques for a variety of things, perhaps most famously competing against humans on the gam show Jeopardy. It has even done an analysis of the characters in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice … Continue reading
Boston Dynamics is apparently developing robots that can walk, pick up boxes, and the like, and deal with problems in a reasonably human-like fashion. Here’s the result of adding an important new module that makes the behavior even more human-like. … Continue reading
A 4-year-old girl named Sophie drives a radio-controlled full-size Volvo truck. The video (which runs a bit over two minutes) gets better and better as it goes along. It’s actually an ad for Volvo to show how tough the truck … Continue reading
An Englishman named Charles Babbage created the first design for a general-purpose programmable digital computer, which he called an “analytical engine,” in 1834. He never finished building it (the full machine would have been huge), but at a party he … Continue reading
Simone Giertz is a remarkable young woman. She lives on a boat and invents things, such as an alarm clock that slaps you to wake you up. Skip ahead to 3 minutes and 20 seconds if you just want to … Continue reading
Here’s someone whose hobby is building various things with stone-age technology, in this case a hut with a ceramic tile roof and underfloor heating. He doesn’t live this way; he’s just interested in how it might be done. His raw … Continue reading
This three-minute silent animation shows how the International Space Station was assembled over a period of many years in near-Earth orbit: Link: https://youtu.be/vgfWH3g9kpY There’s not a lot of information given on how the various modules are used, but that’s covered … Continue reading
A few days ago I posted a four-minute video from John Green talking about the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, an ambitious proposal from the year 2000 to address a number of major world problems in just 15 years. You might … Continue reading
As you’ve probably heard, Volkswagen,the world’s biggest car maker, was caught cheating on emissions tests. Specifically, its diesel engines had software that turned on anti-pollution features only when it detected signs that an emission test was going on. In normal … Continue reading
Venus is closer to Earth with shorter transfer times and tons of solar energy. Unfortunately, its atmosphere at the surface is horrifically tremendously high pressure (comparable to a depth of a kilometer in Earth’s oceans) and unimaginably hot (nearly 900 … Continue reading