coComments related to CousinDave

Thanks for the post, which led

2007-08-24T00:25:47.420+02:00

Thanks for the post, which led in turn to Breasted's own words: "The scribe of over 3,500 years ago...could have had little consciousness of the momentous decision he...was making when he pushed aside the ancient Surgical Treatise, then already a thousand years old, while his own copy was still incomplete. He had copied at least eighteen columns of the venerable treatise and had reached the bottom of a column when, pausing in the middle of a line, in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a word, he . . . laid down his pen and pushed aside forever the great Surgical Treatise..." Found at the Cyber Museum of Neurosurgery.

Is CNET caught up in anthropom

2007-04-11T13:21:56.069+02:00

Is CNET caught up in anthropomorphism? Non-humanoid robots are widespread in industry; you can hardly build cars without them. Spirit and Opportunity have been operating in a dangerous environment on another planet for over three years. One possible advantage of designing robots with human-like features is to learn enough that we can build better prostethics. Otherwise, my guess is that many developers start with a problem -- navigating across terrain, recognizing visual patterns -- and then work to deal with that. Think of the challenge of teaching a teenager to drive... even with as limited a problem as "is it safe to turn left from this side street onto the main road?" The TeenBot wouldn't necessarily need eyes, hands, and feet, but would have to have some way to take in the environment; assess the speed, direction, and distance of vehicles; estimate the time, effort, and actions required for a turn -- it's enough to make me hire a cab.

George, Just to be clear, tha

2007-04-10T19:20:51.751+02:00

George, Just to be clear, that was a compliment. I agree that it's hard to multitask when the two (or more) activities each demand... mental presence, let's say. I'm even a bit dubious about doing much while driving, inasmuch as driving seems to me a process of monitoring and management by exception: nothing peculiar in the rear-view mirror, no odd sound from the engine, no out-of-place motion ahead, here comes someone out of a driveway. We do so much driving that we tend to overestimate its ease, and thus feel free to fill in dead time with phone calls, adjusting the music system, eating lunch. Not to say "never put a CD in, never eat a sandwich." More that at 30 miles / 50 km an hour, a half-second's inattention translates to 44 feet / 13 meters of forward motion. Or maybe I'm just not that good a driver.

George, you sound like you're

2007-04-10T00:04:38.315+02:00

George, you sound like you're channeling Benjamin Franklin: "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do." Which reminds me of another aphorism: common sense tells many people that the earth is flat.