Open Directory - Computers: Robotics: "A comprehensive collection of content, community, and tools available on the subject of Mobile Robotics.
AceUplink - Offers information, forums, tutorials and downloads. Includes a wide range of content, but with a particular bias towards robotic simulation games.
Android World - Lots of information on androids and specific android projects.
Animatronics.org - Pictures, movies and information about animatronics. Includes information on the mechanics, electronics, and programming of modern animtronic systems.
BBC Robot World - Offers news, reviews and history of robots, as well as robot building guides and a discussion forum.
Boilerplate - A Victorian-era robot, his story and pictures. A 1/6 scale replica stands over 12' high and has articulated limbs, illuminating 'eyes,' and wind-up 'guts'. Very interesting.
Channel 4 - Robots - The tie-in page to the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, shown on Channel 4 in the UK. Includes a virtual robot constructor, where you can design and test a robot visually.
CompInfo - Robotics - A huge directory of robotics sites.
Cybug-Space - Educational products including digital logic trainers and insect-like robots.
Georgia Tech MARS - The Georgia Tech branch of MARS involves multi-level learning in hybrid deliberative/reactive mobile robot architectural software systems.
The Handy Board - 6811-based microcontroller system that lets you build mobile robots for educational, hobbyist, and industrial purposes. Used to run robot design courses and competitions at the university and high school level.
The Honda Humanoid Robot - Information about Honda's Humanoid Robot.
How Stuff Works - The Singing Fish - Photographed autopsy of the popular singing fish novelty fad reveals its robotic-like subsystems with complete informative descrip"

David Limbaugh: Liberals in denial: " Because conservatives, according to Hertzberg, thrive on hate. 'For the radiocon audience, political hate (beg ITAL) is comedy and drama. To their ears, it's music"

WhiteHouseforSale.org | Home Page: "The vehicle of choice in this part of Texas is the pickup truck. But the gravel parking lot of the Crawford Community Center on Saturday looked like the showroom of a luxury car dealer. Rows of Mercedes, Jaguars, Lexuses and Cadillacs -- at least one bearing the license plates of a Texas state official -- were lined up out front. Party-going Pioneers and Rangers were escorted onto shuttle buses, which drove them out to the Broken Spoke Ranch."

Dean tapped into pure hatred by rank-and-file Democrats of the reigning Republican: "He has tapped into pure hatred by rank-and-file Democrats of the reigning Republican that I have never seen in 44 years of campaign watching. Not Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or even Bill Clinton generated such animosity"

What makes Dean so distasteful to his Democratic detractors is that he is not part of the establishment and unlikely ever to become part of it. The native New Yorker has become a flinty Vermonter, looking a little like a Calvin Coolidge of the left.

This ''he can't win'' argument did not stop Barry Goldwater, George McGovern, Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter from being nominated, and the last two actually were elected. The party faithful liked the purity of those candidates and did not care about electability, and the same might be proved true of the Anti-Bush.

Web surfing could get 'disorder' classification - 2003-08-06 - The Business Journal of Tampa Bay: "In the journal 'Depression and Anxiety,' UF psychiatrists propose criteria for establishing a disorder marked by extreme Web surfing, e-mailing or other online time.
In separate studies, researchers found people who spent more than 30 hours a week online"

Problematic use would be described as impulse control impairment not attributed to another known disorder,

Daily Kos: Political analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation: "But the killing is significant. We have now officially lost more people after Bush's 'mission accomplished' speech than before. The total is now 257 Americans lost, and 301 if you include the Brits.
53 Americans have been killed since Bush's 'bring them on' moment.
And military families are now organizing against Bush"

Soros has pulled together a coalition of labor, environmental, and women's organizations and will help fund a $75 million effort to oust Bush. The money will be spent in 17 states

Bush Misuses Science, Report Says (washingtonpost.com): "'The Administration's political interference with science has led to misleading statements by the President, inaccurate responses to Congress, altered web sites, suppressed agency reports, erroneous international communications, and the gagging of scientists,' "

An editor at Science, for example, recently said in print that the administration was injecting politics into arenas of science "once immune to this kind of manipulation."

And the editors of the Lancet noted "growing evidence of explicit vetting of appointees to influential [scientific] panels on the basis of their political or religious opinions" and warned against "any further right-wing incursions" on those panels

Bush has appointed to key scientific advisory committees numerous people with political, rather than scientific, credentials. For example, his appointee to a presidential AIDS advisory committee, marketing consultant Jerry Thacker, has described homosexuality as a "deathstyle" and referred to AIDS as the "gay plague."

Liberal legal elite plans comeback: "She also said Bush officials were undoing �the logic of evidence � they have created this evidence-free zone we�re now inhabiting in Washington,� an apparent reference to Bush�s justification for war with Iraq. (Clinton voted for last October�s congressional resolution authorizing Bush to go to war against Iraq.)
Bush administration officials, Clinton warned, are �focused and relentless and absolutely undeterrable.� She added, �If the American public really understood much of this administration�s agenda, they would reject it.�"

“a Who’s Who of people working toward causes I care about, using the law to advance causes that I think are important.”

Despair of the Jobless: "'since the business cycle expansion began in November 2001, payrolls have contracted by 1 million (1.2 million in the private sector), making this the weakest recovery in terms of employment since the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] began tracking monthly data in 1939.'"

There is not even a sense of urgency.

The simple truth is that the interests of the Bush administration's primary constituency, corporate America, do not coincide with the fundamental interests of workaday Americans.

Salt of the Earth: "Here's Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma: 'Could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.'"

His handlers hope that the images will protect him from awkward questions about his actual polluter-friendly policies and, most important, his refusal to face up to politically inconvenient environmental dangers.

So here's the question: will we avoid the fate of past civilizations that destroyed their environments, and hence themselves? And the answer is: not if Mr. Bush can help it

Yahoo! News - Antidepressants Grow New Brain Cells - U.S. Study: "depression can shrink the hippocampus, a brain region crucial to learning and memory but only recently found to be involved in depression. Major stress and trauma -- both depression triggers -- can also cause the shrinkage.
'We have known that antidepressants influence the birth of neurons in the hippocampus."

To make sure that the new brain cells in the hippocampus was the source of the lifted depression, Hen and colleagues at Yale University and in France worked with genetically engineered mice, using X-rays to kill newly growing cells in the hippocampus.


These mice did not respond as they normally would to antidepressants. Mice which were given fluoxetine, an antidepressant sold under the brand-name Prozac by Eli Lilly and Co., and were then given X-rays did not resume grooming as would be expected.


Mice who received no X-rays and were killed after being dosed for 11 or 28 days with fluoxetine showed significant growth of new brain cells.

A drug in a different class, the tricyclic imipramine, also stimulated the growth of neurons

Experts say that 16 percent of Americans -- more than 30 million people -- will suffer major depression at some point in their lives.


The NIMH says major depression is now the No. 1 leading cause of disability around the world.

Yahoo! News - Debate Resumes on the Safety of Depression's Wonder Drugs: "
With S.S.R.I.'s now the most prescribed drugs for depression, it is easy to forget how high passions ran when the F.D.A. convened an expert panel in 1991 to weigh claims that Prozac and other S.S.R.I.'s may cause some patients to become suicidal. The panel's hearing in Bethesda, Md., was mobbed; its chairman wore a bulletproof vest"

Well I wanted to start a project at robots.net, but my certification is too low so I guess I'll start it here. Let's begin with a drawing

\ \ \
Well, this is going to take forever. I think I'll try something different

Create a new account

I first became interested in robots in 1974. I was taking a computer science courses, and I saw the cover of a magazine called Psychology Today. It had a picture of a robotic arm and talked about artificial intelligence. I became intensly interested in neural networks in the late eighties. I have experimented with some extremely rudimentary designs that have applied very simple mechanical principles. I am currently trying to come up with a simple design for a mechanical arm and hand. My purpose is to design and build something that can be easily and cheaply reproduced. My ultimate goal is to have this arm and hand be able to participate in the construction and maintaince of copies of itself. In this way I hope to get multiple robots interacting with each other. I realize that this is an rather unbelieveably ambitious project. I am trying to keep it reduced to its rawest essentials. Writing about it now does fill me with some degree of hopelessness. I think that it quite good for me however to be finally publically stating this as a goal.

Entropy Gradient Reversals - The Rise of the Stupid Network: "the Intelligent Network was a telephone company attempt to engineer vendor independence, more automatic operation, and some 'intelligent' new services into existing network architecture. However, even as it rolls out and matures, the Intelligent Network is being superseded by a Stupid Network,
with nothing but dumb transport in the middle, and intelligent user-controlled endpoints,
whose design is guided by plenty, not scarcity,
where transport is guided by the needs of the data, not the design assumptions of the network. "

kuro5hin.org || The rise of Stupid Everything: "If you build intelligence into your networks you are optimising them for a single purpose at the expense of their flexibility. Any gains you make from this optimisation will be overtaken by general gains in the medium term, leaving you behind in the long term as unexpected uses are found for more general networks"

CNN.com - Santa Fe lawbreakers sentenced to tai chi and tea - Aug. 6, 2003: "De Francis believes that some Asian traditions such as tai chi and tea ceremony teach people to find calmness in their thoughts and, 'find an inner opponent, rather than outer opponent, to do battle with.' "

Participants serve each other herbal tea with Kava Kava, a natural calming agent, and finish the class with an acupuncture treatment for relaxation.

The 43 Facial Muscles That Reveal: "Q. What are the basic human emotions?
A. There are seven that have very clear facial signals � anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt and happiness.
Q. Isn't love a basic human emotion?
A. Romantic and parental love are more enduring than emotions, though they are highly emotionally laden. I don't just feel happy with my daughter. Sometimes I'm worried, sometimes I'm surprised, and sometimes I might feel anger. It's an attachment, not a fleeting emotional state. A mood, by the way, is different still. It doesn't last as long as an attachment, though it can last for hours or even longer."

close observers who, without training, are able to spot subtle cues about concealed emotions that we call microexpressions. These are very fast intense expressions of concealed emotions that most people miss because they typically last less than a quarter of a second.

In a fake smile, only the zygomatic major muscle, which runs from the cheekbone to the corner of the lips, moves. In a real smile, the eyebrows and the skin between the upper eyelid and the eyebrow come down very slightly. The muscle involved is the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis

Crucial to how we feel is being aware of how we are feeling in the moment. The sine qua non of that is to realize that you are being emotional in the first place. The earlier you recognize an emotion, the more choice you will have in dealing with it.

In Buddhist terms, it's recognizing the spark before the flame. In Western terms, it's trying to increase the gap between impulse and saying or doing something you might regret later.

The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life): "In Levitt's view, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients' best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt"

He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else had found. He devises a way to measure an effect that veteran economists had declared unmeasurable.

''Unwantedness leads to high crime; abortion leads to less unwantedness; abortion leads to less crime.''

focusing very much on the issue of reverse causality,''

The problem was that his data couldn't tell him who was a good candidate and who wasn't. It was therefore impossible to tease out the effect of the money. As with the police/crime rate puzzle, he had to trick the data

''If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.''

Is black culture a cause of racial inequality or is it a consequence?

Everything Is Political: " agency's analysts find that they are no longer helping to formulate policy; instead, their job is to rationalize decisions that have already been made. And more and more, they find that they are expected to play up evidence, however weak, that seems to support the administration's case, while suppressing evidence that doesn't.
Am I describing the C.I.A.? The E.P.A.? The National Institutes of Health? Actually, I'm talking about the Treasury Department, but the ambiguity is no coincidence. Across the board, the Bush administration has politicized policy analys"

you ought to be worried about the decisions of an administration that systematically misleads itself. A leader who is told only what he wants to hear is all too likely to make bad decisions about the economy, the environment and beyond.