Technology Report

 Getting humanoid robots through the "uncanny valley". Here's an article about a company building companion robots. They look very realistic, although they lack human level strength and mobility, they're getting closer, and it looks like newer developments in high power electric motors will go a long way toward getting those 'bots up and running, so to speak.

“They had hired an actress to pretend to be a mannequin — and she was really good at it,” McMullen recalls. “For some reason that stuck with me, I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a mannequin that looks so real, that people would think that it was?’ Kind of like an inverse of that experience. I started coming up with this, like, crazy idea of a hyper-realistic, pose-able mannequin.”

To this end, McMullen founded his own company, Abyss Creations in 1996, which is perhaps best known for developing the RealDoll adult companion mannequin, the most deluxe versions of which can fetch over $10,000.

He’s sold thousands of them.

McMullen then founded Realbotix in 2014 to bring a similar realism to robots.

 

Testing, Hamas position

Hamas says the IDF has killed some unlikely number of civilians in Gaza. The IDF thinks otherwise. Here's a 'toon to help you tell the difference:

 

I'm too lazy to put much effort into drawing this, but I think you get the idea.

Fun With Headlines - Statues

 From this mornings New York Times newsletter:

A statue of Robert E. Lee that once stood in Charlottesville, Va. — and was the focus of a 2017 white nationalist rally — will be melted down for a new artwork.

I can just imagine the new artwork in the form of a whip-wielding black slave owner, driving a team of 6 white libs in man-buns and purple hair, laboring mightily to drag a large box (bale?) of ballots to a counting center. Can't see the NYT finding anything wrong with this. In fact, I challenge the NYT to front the modest sum of money required to build this on a cost plus fixed fee basis. That is all costs to the actual artisans, plus a fixed fee, say $100K, to me as the brains behind this work of art.

A Bit Of History

 Frontpagemag has a nice historical piece on the meme going around regarding Stalins quote about counting versus voting. Also contains a historical note that possibly explains the origin of Boris Badenov. A commenter is asking for a bumper sticker. O.K.

Pandemic Fun - With headlines!

 N.Y.Post has an article by a Yale prof speculating that once we get past the Chinky-Pox plague, the world can look forward to sex-crazed orgies and a period of wretched excesses. Sounds like fun.

At the same time, the President of Brazil. a medical authority in his own mind at least, is suggesting that the vaccines may have side effects including the feminization of men, women growing beards, and people generally mutating into Crocodiles. Kind of paints the upcoming orgies in a new light, no?

Keep your social contacts up, and keep the batteries in your phones charged as video of the above might become the next hot product. I'm visualizing a fancy house with my own lagoon where I can mate with/drag under and eat the supply of bearded bikini babes this will attract.

Reloading Press

 A friend of mine had 2 of these things in his shop when he moved but had never seen them used, nor any idea what they were for. He figured they had to be good for something and guessed that I might think of something so he gave me one. 

It's all pneumatic and came with no tooling at all. It indexes through 8 stations and can be made to stop accurately so I thought I might try automating my reloading press. So far I've made 8 shell holders, the ring which will hold the tooling, and a frame to hold it all together. Shells are loaded at the 5 o'clock position, decapped at 6 o'clock where the tall tower is mounted, primed at 7, inspected for primer at 9, etc. 

This is proving to be a non-trivial project so don't hold your breath waiting for video of shells falling like rain at the 3 O'clock position. The primer inspection will be just a poke with a wire which will trigger a light if it goes too far up so that should be easy. All else is done from the top and might be done by mounting the tools on ball screws. I'm thinking it will be run from an Arduino controller so I can include emergency stops if one of the inspections fails or whatever

As I've warned you before, prepare for retirement by starting an unending project so you'll have a reason to get out of bed in the morning, and your immortality is virtually assured. If you don't, you'll be dead in 6 months.

Happy New Year

Looks pretty happy to me.

Fun Shooting

My local club IDPA was today and the stages had carbine written all over them, so I used the carbine.
Here's stage 2 called Turkey Shoot, 2 targets, first one shot from 15 yards, seated at a table:

 Here's a closeup of the target.

Look carefully, there are 4 threats and 2 no-shoots on this and the threats are all at least 50% armored. Under the new rules, the no-shoots will cost you 5 points per hit on them so if you're going for head shots on that lower middle one, aim carefully.

Having fired 8 shots, 2 per threat with no misses I presume, the shooter moves up to the left side of the barrels, some 7 yards from target set #2

 and staying on the right side of the fault line, fires on the 5(!) threats while not hitting the no-shoot.

Again the threats are all at least 50% armored. I do not remember what the scenario story behind this was, but since the Rules state that all stages must have a story, I will obligingly make one up:

As a highly paid and highly alert security guard in the Phinias T. Phogbound Congressional office building, you are seated at your desk with your gun and all loading devices on the table in front of you when a scream from down the hallway alerts you to trouble. Looking up you see a congressional rules making committee attempting to grope 2 congressional aides. Without getting up, you engage the gropers without injuring the gropees. Hearing further commotion from around the corner, you scoop up your magazines and move to the corner conference room where you find even worse, 5 congressmen attacking a single aide. Again defend the aide.

There, see? Literature worthy of Larry Correia. Except that he would develop the personalities of every one involved, the gropers would be taken from the AD&D guide book, and he would have received a six figure advance before hitting a single keystroke.

Hmmmm. IDPA stages as basis for action adventure novels? Hmmmm...

You don't often see targets like these two in IDPA matches, but we're rather limited for space. The whole bay is 42 ft wide and 26 yards deep so each stage needs to fit a 21 foot wide area. It kinda cramps your style and places a premium on creativity.

QOTD - Creativity

Found today on Scott Adams' blog in a post about the presidents new word "covefefe."

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

Being creative or inventive often enough involves making large numbers of mistakes. It's how you figure out what doesn't work on your way to that better mousetrap. Lots of things were discovered while trying to invent something else. Sometimes it's art. Sometimes it's a whole new industry.

I might add that intuition is knowing how far back to stand while testing the new product or process.

IDPA Stage Design

We had a stage at todays match the like of which I haven't seen in some time as it is shot completely from a prone position. The story is that you went out partying and awaken lying in a gutter to find yourself being used for target practice by the Gutter Gang whom you have to out shoot from your position horizontal in the gutter.

There are no negative outcomes for this scene. Either you kill all of them and the gunfire stops, or they kill you and the gunfire stops. Anyway the stage brought to mind a song variously ascribed to the WCTU or some pack of happy drunks:

THE PIG AND THE INEBRIATE
from SONGFEST by Best and Best


It was early last December, as near as I remember
I was walking down the street in tipsy pride
No one I was disturbing, as I lay down by the curbing
And a pig came up and lay down by my side


As I lay there in the gutter, thinking thoughts I cannot utter
A lady passing by was heard to say,
"You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses,"
And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

I know the tune, but I have no idea where else it may have been used so you'll have to come up with your own. It's a slow paced song of the sort that gives you plenty of time to remember the next word in each line.

UPDATE: Thanks to Dave, here's a link to the tune.

Dog Walking

I am obviously walking my dog in the wrong neighborhood.

Or at least at the wrong time. Certainly at the wrong season, it's 30F out right now and that's the high for the day.

New Years Aspirations

A friend sent me this today:

Vesna Vulović (Serbian Cyrillic: Весна Вуловић; [ˈʋeːsna ˈʋuːlɔvit͡ɕ]; 3 January 1950 – 23 December 2016) was a Serbian flight attendant. She holds the Guinness world record for surviving the highest fall without
a parachute: 10,160 metres (33,333 ft), after the explosion of JAT Flight 367 near Srbská Kamenice, Czechoslovakia on 26 January 1972.

She was the sole survivor of the accident.

source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulović

10,000 meters is more than 6 miles... 

 It's people like this who challenge us in the coming year to try to push envelopes and to surpass. Being retired and not having a sufficiently anti social project like a hotrod, trike, motorcycle, death ray or some such to work on is additional inspiration. 

Not to worry, I'll think of something. 

Hillary Bumper Stickers

Hillary '16!
Honesty is so last century.

Hillary '16!
Put her in the White House
Before they put her in the Big House!

Voting 3rd party means never having to admit you elected her.

$10 Bill

A solution just occurred to me for the problem of picking a sufficiently distinguished dead woman to grace the $10 bill:

Issue an Executive Order declaring that Alexander Hamilton now self-identifies as a woman and leave the bill alone.

Problem solved. You're welcome.

Kinetics

The annual Kinetic Sculpture contest, now held in Longmont went off yesterday. A pale shadow of its former self, but still entertaining and now including a second kinetic float contest for the kids to build something on the spot.

The start was its usual well-oiled self with the national anthem being inaudible from my position where I'm supposed to fire the start gun and sculptures hitting the water a good 5 minutes in advance of the actual start time. We saw the floats moving away, couldn't get any confirmation of what was happening, and so fired the start gun 2 minutes early to send off the retreating machines.

The Minions

Something about Cupid and bacon

And the shark among others were entered. We were set up at Rags Folly which involves negotiating a large ditch/creek bed

It helps if you can pick up your sculpture and carry it in places like this. After the race, there were various events culminating in a bonfire at 8:30 which I couldn't stay for. Here's the bonfire float:

a work of art in its own right.

Regardless of your position, the race officially ended at 3 PM at which point I fire the Finish Gun

and wherever you are on the course at that point you are DNF but awarded position. It looked to me like only 3 vehicles got all the way around the course in the allotted 2 hours. At this event the lab coat was de regieur.

Thanks again to Karl who helped with the gun and took the above picture. Best I've ever gotten on the cannon firing. For you gun nuts, that's 400gr of fffg black powder under a tennis ball. The ball did not seem to have survived the experience and splashed down about 100 yards out, exact condition unknown but probably badly shredded.

Great Art

Saw this on my way home the other day.

Reputedly their food is good as well.

School Lunch

We all have fond (?) memories of the lunches served to us in school but now the Presidents wife is getting involved. Here's a picture of a school lunch served in Portsmouth VA. Some complain about bad lighting, but I thing it's a masterpiece of the photographers art.

Some really gifted Photoshop artist has made this very large garden snail almost look like a fish fillet under a whole wheat roll. The other stuff is presumably Purina Snail Chow put there to keep the entree fresh.

Draw the Prophet

AFDI, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer are holding a "draw the Prophet" contest with a fairly rich first prize. I thought this was a fine idea and I still do. There are rules to this contest that forbid anything you couldn't publish in a family blog, and demand that all entries be signed by the author. This pretty much eliminates my potential entry which would require any fundamentalist Muslim seeing it to rip out his own eyeballs, after beheading me of course.

Wanting to preserve my life is apparently Islamophobic, so no entry from Billll.

QOTD - Beauty

After considerable searching, I found this, variously attributed to Edgar Allen Poe and Francis Bacon:

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Francis Bacon

The Poe version was in slightly more modern English which makes me think he was quoting Bacon. Mmmmm Bacon.

This observation has very broad application as anyone who ever owned a sports car will attest.

Ars Gratia Artis

A silly notion, this. Anyone who can do good art is making a comfortable living in advertising, which is where most of the market for art actually is.

Anyway the state just dropped $1M and 6 months to come up with a logo to use to promote Colorado to the rest of the world, and came up with this:

Ignore the number 7, it's not actually part of the logo. Without the word Colorado under it, it looks like a hazmat placard for a truck carrying Carbon Monoxide. It appears in another contest here in which students at my Alma mater Metro State, were given 2 days to come up with a better logo. The top six are these:

 

I like #3 as did a large number of people voting at the Denver Pest article on the topic. 

Whoever did the #3 logo got lucky in that I was not in that class, and did not collaborate on the work. I would have used the graphics, but without the enclosing dome. Instead I'd have put the graphic on the side of a big, fat, smoldering blunt.

I don't use the stuff, nor do I endorse it but if you're trying to capture the essence of the state as it currently stands....