Saturday, July 15, 2006

How to Survive a Robot Uprising

I just finished How to Survive a Robot Uprising. Well of all the books I've read, possible ever, this is the only one that will inevitably save my life one day. Yes, I did find out about this book from Akshai's blog. A PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon in robotics decided that not all of hollywood can be wrong so one day robots will eventually have an uprising. So he talked to robotics professors and experts about topics such as how to know when your robotic vacuum has decided to turn against you and in that case how best to defeat it. I will say there were some slow moments when he really dug more into the robotics than focusing on being funny but if you can read between the jokes there is some interesting info on the current state of robotics. But slow moments or not if you don't read the book won't you be sorry when your toaster and roomba join forces against you.

In other news - went to the beach today (surprise, surprise) and other than reading How to Survive a Robot Uprising, I watched the surfing competition they were holding by the pier. It was very cool to see some really good surfers - they were doing stuff like walking up and down the board to control it which I hadn't seen before and of course they were able to pull some cool moves. The waves weren't huge so they didn't do anything too crazy, but still fun to watch. At the same time they were running a few other random competitions. One of which involved paddling large canoes out into the ocean and back - not that exciting on its own, but when a good wave hit it would send people flying out of the canoe and then they would scramble to get it flipped back over and get back in (the first time I saw it I assumed the guy would just give up - as that's probably what I would do). Anyway, time to stop poorly describing stuff I saw today and go see pirates since if Hollywood tells me to see a movie enough times I can't exert enough self control to do otherwise.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ack! Don't leave us hanging .. what do we do if our toaster turns against us?!

Jess said...

Just lettin' ya know that I finally switched to RSS feed! Aren'tcha proud? :)