J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster
A recommendation from me, to you.
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If it shows up in a cinema near you, go watch it, you'll laugh. And Bob Marley will never be the same again.
Sociable robots
I went to a talk this evening by Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, who's the director of the Personal Robots Group at the MIT.
Her talk was centered around the sociable robots, and the research she is doing in that area. The talk was luckily devoid of much of the usual technical lingo you normally meet in talks like this, and instead it was interestingly full of all the social and psychological issues in making a robot learn how to perform tasks by watching others do it — through social learning. This, as Dr. Breazeal said, is very important if we want robots to be human, and sociable, because that's how we learn.
She showed a lot of video clips of her main project with the robot Leonardo, but also from Autom, Huggable and the mds robot, which are all reachable from the projects page of the Robots Lab at MIT.
The Q&A was good, run by a presenter from RTE (whose name escapes me), but there was the token robophobic questions about how far we are from the world of Blade Runner (which deals with genetics, and not with robotics), and what's going to stop the robots from turning against us, if we make them so clever. The answer? It's related to culture. We, in the western world, see robots as something we eventually will have to fight with. In Japan for example, robots are seen as colleagues, partners, friends, someone that you co-exist with, and which helps us do things better, and who understands us, on a human level.
That's pretty deep, and as the presenter said, he might end up marrying a robot some day, at least, if they get as good as Dr. Breazeal is working toward making them.
Useful links
Friendly Robots on PBS Leonardo learning about buttons on YouTube
Chocolate City, and its Vanilla suburbs
In light of what happened yesterday, and inspired of an email I just got, stating that WFMU played Chocolate City on repeat for 3 hours yesterday, here's my contribution. Listen to this track, and listen to it well. Who wouldn't want Stevie Wonder as Minister of Fine Arts (as long as he doesn't play "I Just Called")?
They still call it the White House
But that's a temporary condition, too.
Can you dig it, CC?
Some videos for tomorrows vote
Saul Williams wrote An Open Letter To History:
And Dres from Black Sheep rewrote the lyrics for The Choice is Yours, to fit the purpose:
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Too bad Europeans can only sit back and wait for the votes to be counted (while we watch some pretty good videos, granted).
Music links
Bodytonic talks to Christian Prommer about his jazz treatment of a handful of major dance tracks on Drum Lesson Vol1 MTV Music — A large catalogue of music videos. I'm sure this will become a quite popular source of music at parties, but they fail to provide Rock Me Amadeus with Falco, they only have The Sound of Music. I think that should be the litmus test of any service providing music videos. It's an adventure in 80s baroque, I'd say Lella and Rosella's Onemoretune.ie is up and running. They have a lot of interviews with musicians playing in Dublin, check it out
Humor and magic
See why Bob Marley shouldn't have acted as his own attorney, and what the whole "saving the princess"-thing did to Mario on the Seth Macfarlane Cavalcade. Actually, they are all pretty funny.
Attended a very engaging talk with Richard Wiseman last night at the Science Gallery, it was brilliant. Prof. Wiseman is a very eloquent speaker, and he showed some great optical illusions, of which I'm a great fan. One of them is the "pink dots to green" illusion. Do as it says on the tin, and you see stuff disappear, change colour, and reappear. All that, without drugs (:
He's also the man behind the colour changing card trick.
