Zen and the Art of Prop Making

A quick search on YouTube for Rubik cube robots will illustrate how many people have devoted their time to solving this puzzle. There are robots that look like humans that have been designed to solve the Rubik cube puzzle but they seem clunky and awkward in their operation. They do finally solve the puzzle but none of them do it as quickly as Ruby, the brainchild of students at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Not only does Ruby solve the Rubik cube puzzle in record time but her design and operation is a beauty to behold. Ruby is also a work of art and a credit to her designers. YouTube Videos of Rubik cube You think Ruby is fast solving the Rubik cube puzzle? It is still not as fast as a human. Below is world champion Feliks Zemdegs solving the Rubic cube puzzle in record time of 6.24 seconds! Will robotics ever achieve the blinding dexterity of the human hand? More Rubik cube videos available on YouTube.

The idea of a mechanised suit that gives a human being super strength is not new. Numerous examples of an exoskeleton suit can be found in movies such as Aliens, Iron Man and, more recently, Avatar and District 9. Most people will appreciate how fanciful such concepts are, particularly with modern advances in CGI technology. A practical exoskeleton suit In a good example of life imitating art, the folks at Raytheon have made some pretty impressive steps in making the concept of an exoskeleton suit a reality. The video below shows a working example of the XOS 2, a tethered exoskeleton suit which gives its human operator super strength.

Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer and inventor. He was born in 1883 and died in 1970 and was best known for his cartoons depicting impossibly complicated machines doing very simple tasks. Any device that is designed to do a very simple task in a highly complicated fashion is known as a Rube Goldberg machine . We all remember as kids seeing a room full of dominos falling in patterns after one is knocked over triggering a chain reaction. The same concept was used in another Rube Goldberg machine - the game called Mousetrap where a ball operates an interconnected series of chutes, levers and buttons on the machine. The "OK Go" Rube Goldberg machine I saw this OK Go video for the first time today and the technical aspects of their machine blew me away. This Rube Goldberg machine that the band OK Go built takes the concept and launches it into the stratosphere! Here is the official OK Go video for the recorded version of "This Too Shal...

The rising popularity of automated comment spam software targeting blogs is annoying. The only thing they have to offer is a bit of entertainment in how badly they are written and how natural sounding they try to be. Comment spam promising to bookmark my posts, informing that they will be telling all their friends how informative my posts are and that they will be coming back again soon leaves me breathless with anticipation. Dumber and dumber comment spam I've decided to dedicate a post to comment spam I've received. All comment spam had no relevance whatsoever to the associated post content and all had URL's linking back to commercial sites. I'm sure you will find much of this comment spam familiar. I've rated them on a score of 1-10 within a category for a bit of fun. - You post great articles. Bookmarked ! ( 1/10 for originality) - Pretty nice article. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed browsing your blog pos...

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...