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That there is clearly a robot with a head of a human looking doll.
It is not even trying to appear human - it is trying to appear like a doll.
So, we file it mentally under "D for doll" or "R for Robot" and ignore the uncannyness as we are just approaching the valley.
The valley actually starts to show with examples like this, and Repliee.

And here is where TFA falls on its uncanny ass:

If machines can trigger cognitive dissonance in the human brain, roboticists must continue to carefully tweak their creations, to avoid individual revulsion and even a society-wide blowback.
That would be a major concern for the designers and manufacturers of the coming generation of social robots.
It would be, if the uncanny didn't evaporate on contact.

A Hypothetical Chasm
David Hanson, a roboticist whose company, Hanson Robotics, specializes in ultra-realistic robotic heads, actively seeks out the uncanny.
He keeps the motors in his rubber-skinned faces noisy and overtly robotic, and sometimes presents these lifelike talking heads mounted on a stick.
And for better or worse, even the shock value of Hanson's buzzing, decapitated heads doesn't stick around for long.
"In my experience, people get used to the robots very quickly," Hanson says. "As in, within minutes."

It is really hard to argue with an article that so blindly ignores the very topic it is talking about.
Its not the robots (of any kind - humanoid or not) that fall into the valley. We KNOW robots.
They are just another version of all those mechanical puppets that have been around for centuries.

It is the human simulacrum that freaks us out.

A photo of a nearly perfect humanoid head freaks us out because it registers as a human head that is "not OK" in some way.
We "feel" that there is something wrong with it.
But as soon as it starts to whir and buzz and click and move rhythmically like a robot - our perspective changes and it is no longer "strange and alien and wrong".
It "becomes" a robot.

That is why the photos of those supposed robotic inhabitants of the valley are freaky, while people find CB2 to be "cuddly" in person.
Or why this one becomes increasingly freaky once the camera zooms in to show just the face.
Instantly, it is no longer a robotic mannequin we are looking at, but a dead human head - smiling.
Then, as the camera zooms out, and the robot starts to move and talk - it is once again a humanoid mannequin, a moving statue, a robot.

I see no lattice.

Unless you refer to the lattice under the molecule. They don't float.

You are totally correct on the literature.. I was posting quickly ;) Rao & Ballard in particular I think influence Hawkins works (not to mention that Rao was one of the people who convinced me to go into neuroscience.. but I digress). The problem with Lee & Mumford is that it's now been known for quite a while that V1 receptive fields are not static, but dynamic in really cool ways.. Check out Ohzawa's videos for example.

http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/

http://www-nishio.ise.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/~tsutomu/

Pictures of Repliee. The android behind her doesn't appear too lifelike, though.

It appears that the Osaka lab has been /.ed. Might be interesting once everything settles down.

Here's a link for the torrent file including the three example videos at http://ed-02.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/lab/development /Humanoid/ReplieeQ1/ReplieeQ1_eng.htm.

* The example of humanlike motions - 35MB
* The example 2 - 18MB
* The idling motions - 71MB

http://kor.setti.info/ReplieeQ1.torrent

Videos here, but dying fast.

Others have noted that the eye is an analog device, and so the notion of a 'frame rate' is absurd for that reason. Fair enough. Still, there's a limit to how fast the receptors in the human eye can 'refresh' themselves. Light shining on the eye triggers reversible chemical reactions; the rate at which the receptors can be restored to their unstimulated state after exposure to light arguably places an upper limit on the eye's 'frame rate'. In getting that signal to the brain, again a number of reversible reactions take place, all of which may impose an upper limit on your vision 'refresh rate'.

For those that are interested, there's not a bad description of the entire process in point form here, as well as a more detailed description of phototransduction (what happens when photons strike the retina) here. A diagram of the phototranduction cascade is here.

As someone who works in the laser fusion camp(though just as a lowly technician), I feel obligated to point out that there may be something of a dark horse in the race to fusion power currently in the running... Besides the obvious method of magnetic confinement in Tokamaks and Stellarators, which do still have the best chance at becoming true fusion reactors of the future attaining ignition and breakeven; there is another way that inertial confinement fusion using lasers may still hold promise. There are 2 new beams (will be called "Omega EP")currently being built which will be added to the 60 beam 60 Terawatt Omega Laser in the next few years. What is special about these new lasers is they are over 1,000 TIMES more powerful than the old Omega beams at over 1 Petawatt each! The new lasers will be used to ignite a Hydrogen fuel capsule at exactly the moment of highest compression by the old Omega laser, sort of acting like a spark plug effect. The GekkoXII laser in Japan which has a (much weaker) Petawatt laser attached to it's also less powerful compressing laser recently verified this method as increasing fusion yield by a couple orders of magnitude, this puts the Omega laser as having a very high likelihood of igniting it's fusion capsules by using the new laser in conjunction with the old 60 beam Omega. If someone can then figure out how to ramp the laser up to a high pulse repetition rate (burning many capsules/second) possibly using a diode pumped Nd:glass system then you have a real contender for a fusion power plant.

The company will release more details at the Japan Robot Conference, which opens on 12 October at Osaka University.

So, I quess more info will be available here in a couple of days.

Four people are credited with designing the 4004: Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor, Federico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima.

There are evidently bad feelings between Faggin and Hoff because Faggin feels he did all of the real work, and Hoff got much of the credit. Many accounts do not give Shima any credit, only giving credit to the three Intel engineers (Shima was an engineer at Busicom, a Japanese calculator company at the time, and later became an Intel engineer).

Interview with Shima (extremely interesting and detailed)

Another interview with Shima

Interview with Hoff

An e-mail from Mazor, and nice pictures of the 4004

A really nice picture of the 4004

A picture of three of the engineers (no Shima) years later

A picture of all four engineers

Federico Faggin's initials on the 4004 -- the only initials on the chip