Zen and the Art of Prop Making

While researching robots I came across a company who has made a mechanical dog robot. They have made some amazing progress in the science of walking machines. The company is called Boston Dynamics and they have developed a four legged mechanical dog called, surprise surprise, Big Dog. Lifelike mechanical dog As you can see in the video this mechanical dog robot appears almost lifelike in it's movements. At one point a guy tries to push the machine over and it recovers itself! Shots of it navigating an icy surface have to be seen to be believed!

Avatar is one of those films that lives up to its hype. You are taken on a fantastic journey to an alien world filled with everything from the dizzying delights of floating island mountains and flourescent jungle plants to the nightmarish horrors of marauding packs of viperwolves and the destructive fury unleashed by the military mind. Like her namesake box the planet Pandora is full of surprises. The visuals are stunning and bear more than a passing resemblance to the surreal landscapes portrayed in the "Myst" series of computer games from Cyan Software which were first released in 1993. In particular the forest island in "Riven" and the giant tree in the Edanna Age from "Myst - Exile" share many similarities to the wonders in Avatar. Jim Cameron has lifted their surreal landscapes to a new level of immersive realism with the techologies now available today. Issues of global conservation, concepts of the Earth Mother (or Gaia) and the inter-connectedenes ...

I confess to being a Trekkie from way back so I *had* to see the new Star Trek movie. I thought they did a great job. The starship NCC-1701 was a beautiful piece of engineering (model making) and you got a real sense of its internal structure. The props were excellent and totally believable. Everything was updated with new millenium technology and was faithful in essence to the original starship Enterprise. Great Star Trek casting The Star trek cast echoed the original characters accurately and much of the original humour between them was evident in their younger versions in this film. Uhuru's relationship with the young Spock was a surprise however the other characters reacted just as I would have expected. Chris Pine captured Captain Kirk brilliantly when he sat cross legged in his chair on the bridge. The inclusion of Leonard Nimoy as the old Spock provided a great connection with his younger self played by Zachary Quinto. The 17 year old Checkov couldn't have had a thicke...

Is all the time and effort that we put into blogs really worth the effort? We have an initial surge of literary largesse with their first blogging experience but I wonder how many of the plaintive "Hello world" posts have actually been read by a human? Does anyone ever benefit from blogs ? Considering the sheer volume of information available on the Interent today the vast majority are unlikely to become compulsory reading material. Am I too cynical? I'm probably just tired of looking at the computer screen. Working on a computer has an addictive quality and I can be, as a friend recently pointed out, doggedly obsessive when I'm focussed on a project. Blogs or bogs I personally don't like the word blog. It sounds heavy and cumbersome - a bit of a downer. Blogs conjure up images of swamps and bogs. Uploading information to a blog seems a contradiction of terms. Dump seems more appropriate. Like some primordial tar pit into which things fall and are then preserved...