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Yeah. University of Florida.

First we took their President, then we took their football coach, next... we take their mathematicians!

Still, he's Icelandic. He should have no trouble with a shark. (1)

The only thing to worry about is the lasers, and a reflective bodysuit would handle that pretty well. (Of course, then he looks like the Silver Surfer, and then we've got Galactus to worry about.)

Where do you put the capacitor when you hook up a bicolor LED to produce white light?

I do not know of bicolor LEDs with AC applied to them ever causing anybody's head to explode. Rapidly switching the red and green dies on and off with AC current produces yellow light. For more information see http://www.phys.ufl.edu/demo/5_ElectricityMagnetis m/L_ACCircuits/TwocolorLEDACcircuit.html

I was under the impression that information had 0 thermodynamic value. Where'd you hear otherwise?

According to Landauer's principle, if you erase a bit, you must use up at least kT ln2 energy (i.e. that much is liberated as unusable heat). Here, k is Boltzmann's constant, so at room temperature this amounts to about 2.85*10^(-21) Joules per bit. This seems rather small, but trends in computing technology suggest that this hard limit will become a serious problem within the next 20 years.

We can theoretically circumvent this problem by using reversible logic, which is a computing model that does not erase any bits. The MIT Pendulum project did some work on this, and they constructed some defective reversible circuits (info here), but the project seems to have stopped. I haven't heard of any practical implementations, but I'm not a specialist.

As a bonus, here are some of the results from some others' research on nanotech:
* When rats inhale carbon nanotubes, the tubes bypass the blood-brain barrier and cover the brain. The resultant rats had black brains!
* Titania dioxide, a common ingredient in paint, sun screen and tooth paste, is very toxic to cells and rats.
* Silica dioxide, also a common ingredient in paint and food, is not toxic.
* Fullerenes (aka, bucky balls) are deadly to fish (verified by Richard Smalley from Rice University --- he created bucky balls)

Note that all of these materials exhibit very different properties from the bulk. You won't get sick from most of these products if you use the same concentrations of material, but simply change the size of the particles.

Our work will be published early next week on http://www.nanotoxicology.ufl.edu/.

I recall a story on something similar a few years back. A University of Florida MAV research project that had little carbon fiber versions of these, with an integrated video camera. The camera feed went into a land based computer which did image processing, calculating the location of the horizon, therefore giving the computer an effective artificial horizon to work with. With this data, the computer sent rc signals back to the plane, basically providing it with wing leveling capabilities. Researchers could provide bank, pitch and power inputs, and the wing leveler would respond appropriately.

It was a very cool project, and they had lots of video demos...unfortunately it just seemed to drop off the face of the earth. My thoughts were that it had been coopted by the military for something like this.

Anyway, here's the original URL. If anyone has any followup info on this story, speak up!
http://aeroweb.aero.ufl.edu/microav

(On this chance that this is a serious question)
A reference to Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Borg," a race of drone-like, hive minded cyborgs intent on assimilating all advanced life, technology, etc... into its collective.

A larger version

Inspired by this:
Locutus of Borg(Picard)

I was getting excited since I thought they had actually created a practical reversible computing hardware system. The idea behind true reversible computing is that information flow in computation is linked to the energy lost as heat during computing. Von Neumann showed that there was a hard limit on the amount of energy needed everytime a bit of information is lost dependent on Boltzmann's constant and temperature of the system. The ultimate goal is to have a computer that looks a lot like particle physics where the rules are completely time-symmetric. I.e. if I reverse the flow of time, the laws of physics will still run properly and allow me to reconstruct all the previous states from the present one. While the principle of quantum reversibility (sometimes called the "conservation of information law") you can't do the same with most binary operations since all the common ones except NOT take in 2 bits and output 1 bit. Thus, it is impossible to run the system in reverse and reconstruct those two bits from that one bit. This has the adverse effect of wasting energy as heat into the environment.

It's and interesting field that's going to take off as Moore's Law slows down due to wasted heat. A good starting page with links for the interested is here.

--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox
Wired article as proof

Check out Bable. It's more one of those jumbled text generation programs, but it is open source, so you can look at one way to analyze language using Markov chains.

For example, I have a Creative SBLive! card which is supported. I load a patchset using the asfxload utility, and my hardware synth can be accessed at MIDI port 65:0. I also have Timidity+ installed, and it's found at port 128:0. And finally, I have an external MIDI keyboard (an old Yamaha PSR-300) which is connected via a gameport to MIDI adapter cable to the SBLive!. The external keyboard is at port 64:0.

Using ALSA's "pmidi" command, I can spool a midi file to any of these devices, so I can actually make the Yamaha play the file externally. I haven't checked out the latest Rosegarden yet, but if it supports ALSA now, then it should be able to output to any of these devices. Old versions only supported the old linux OSS device /dev/sequencer, or you could output a midi file and play it however works best for you. Supposedly you can also capture MIDI and WAV data from external keyboards and other sources but I haven't figured that out yet.

Rosegarden is very cool if you have ALSA sound. I use it to write sheet music scores for my drums, bass, and synth tracks. Then I play the midi file and jam along with my electric guitar which runs into the soundcard through an amp simulator on the line in port. The computer mixes the output together and sounds great. The amp simulator (Zoom 503) basically makes my guitar sound like its being miked from an overdriven Marshall stack and that way I don't have to have a bunch of effects pedals daisy chained together to get a decent sound from the guitar. There are newer amp simulators like the PoD units that are also ideal for running a guitar directly into a soundcard.

Yes, you too can be just like Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, making weird music in your own home all by yourself with a Linux computer, Rosegarden, and some rather inexpensive equipment.

Another really cool music creation program to check out is Cecilia. It is a pretty technically oriented synthesizer package which can make some really weird sounds: think Pink Floyd. I haven't figured out how to really use it in combination with Rosegarden yet, but its a blast to play around with it and make strange sounds. Cecilia is pretty crashy and hasn't been updated in a while, but it's still a very nifty toy to fool around with.

Let's see. Illegal drug use is reported among 11% of Americans, so at worst, 1 in 9. However, if your sense of right and wrong permits you to make "minor infraactions" like speeding, there's a higher than average probability that you also would see drug use in the same way. There are studies to support this.

My guess... probably better than 1 in 3.

This great practically self-taught Indian mathematician might have said differently.

Also, a brief look into the history of mathematics will reveal a decimal system in use in India around 2100BC, the development of theories of a solar-centric solar system, and pi around 500 AD, and tangible proof of the development of zero and negative numbers around 650-ish AD (the 7th century, and yes, this is a huge accomplishment nit-wit). Additonally, the term sine is derived from an Indian word, as trigonometry originated there, though you likely never made it through algebra.

The contributions made by the people of the Indian subcontinent are far from trivial. Sounds like someone also needs a history lesson.

I wonder how this will impact others who sell CPU horsepower:
Like CNS

The margin of error depends on the age of the sample (amongst other things). It is not fixed at 2000 years: see RC dating

Those poor souls who don't have Macs, even.

Googling for the emacs stuff produces lots of links to the emacs documentation for it, such as this, if anyone is interested.

31. Armies
Armies are tools of violence;
They cause men to hate and fear.
The sage will not join them.
His purpose is creation;
Their purpose is destruction.

Weapons are tools of violence,
Not of the sage;
He uses them only when there is no choice,
And then calmly, and with tact,
For he finds no beauty in them.

Whoever finds beauty in weapons
Delights in the slaughter of men;
And who delights in slaughter
Cannot content himself with peace.

So slaughters must be mourned
And conquest celebrated with a funeral.

Movies are self-regulated, but only after repeated threats from government that it either self-regulate or be regulated by government. This has happened many times, with major events in 1909-1915 (several states wanting to regulate), 1950-1965 (more threatened regulations), and 1983-1991 (introduction of more ratings and more threatened regulations). They are regulated, just self-regulated with threats of governmental regulations. The same thing recently happened with music: they were told either to put together their own regulation system or have one forced on them.

Cars are regulated. You can't just build your own car and drive it on the roads without having it pass various legal requirements. The car must be registered and pass roadworthy requirements, or have a waiver of the requirements. Minors either cannot hold drivers licenses, have graduated restrictions, or are otherwise regulated for minors.

Sex. This is actually heavily regulated. Rape and statutory rape, molestation, prostitution, and many other sexual acts are all legislated. A few studies have found most teenage pregnancies are due to underage girls with adult males. Those are all covered under statutory rape and/or prostitution laws. In most US states, children under age 16 cannot legally have consentual sex, basically for the same reason they can't sign contracts (as you mentioned in your post). After age 16, things get a bit tricky, but as you can see, it *IS* regulated.

liquor and tobacco, obviously regulated by the ATF in the US.

marriage. Many states have legal definitions of marraige, requirements on who can get married, what constitutes a commonlaw marraige. For example, some people seem to think of Utah as a home of polygamists, but one requirement Congress made for Utah's statehood was to have and enforce laws preventing polygamy. After 110 years, they are still enforced, and sometimes make national news. That's all regulation.

Looks like 6/6 to me.

frob

The amazing thing is how well Moore's law has stood up against repeated Malthusian forecasts of its demise. One still presumes that the fences of quantum uncertainty, relativistic delay, and heat production will prevent Moore's law from continuing number of device doubling indefinitely, without major paradigm shift (async to beat the clock?reversible to beat heat & entropy? optical? quantum?), but mere technological advances may continue far beyond my Malthusian imagination.

================
Cole's Law -- Finely Sliced Cabbage with dressing.

That wall ready a problem now....

--------- "There are nearly ten thousand man-made objects larger than a softball in Earth orbit. Of these, only seven percent are operational satellites. The remaining ninety-three percent consists of dead satellites, rocket fragments and debris." http://massivechange.com/article.php?story=2004102 420331275
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4402/ch2.htm/ -----

And they loose tracking of *ALL* of it due to Solar Flares...

----
Such disturbances last from minutes to hours, corresponding to the lifetime of the flare, and can result in what is known as short-wave-fadeout, in which radio signal strength can fade or drop out completely due to increased absorption. Amateur radio enthusiasts, search and rescue organisations, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, many military transmissions and other high-frequency radio communications are severely hampered by such events. Additionally, the increased occurrence of electron density irregularities along the ground-to-satellite transmission path results in the higher VHF and UHF frequencies experiencing unpredictable reflections and scattering (scintillation) of the signal phase strength resulting in transmission interference.
----------
http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~graham/Preprints/sunny/s unny-uk.txt/

---------

"Clutch my testes, bloody squirrel humpers!!" -Happy Noodle Boy

Dijjer looks pretty cool, too bad all peer to peer protocols of any sort are banned at my university under pain of being blacklisted...

That could be useful for Smell-O-Vision. The future is here... today!

except deathstars can't be "re-certified".

Fixed link to the neurally controlled animat (pdf)

Yeah, its interesting/amusing what gets classified as an epidemic. AIDS is an epidemic where there are ~ 42 million people living with it (tested positive for the HIV virus, not necessarily sick or whatever), and ~ 3.1 million people die from it annually.

TB is _not_ an epidemic, but it infects an estimated 8.7 million people a year and kills 2 million a year despite widespread control efforts.

Some 6600 people have contracted SARS worldwide, and that _is_ an epidemic.

Influenza (flu) is said to be a seasonally epidemic kinda thing where about 20,000 people die a year, but thats not scary enough for the news (although they pushed it last winter in the US a little). Its not too exciting, because most (90%) of the people that die are over 65. It was a "big epidemic" in 1918 when 500,000 people died from it.

AIDS is the best. Its an untreatable/uncurable disease that is supposedly spread by contact with fluids such as blood or sex goo. We've all been told that "AIDS does not discrimiate", but it does! In the US, its mostly black gay men (and some IV drug users) that get it, whereas in Africa its black heterosexual women that get it. After 20 years and I'm guessing millions if not billions of dollars in research have not even provided any kind of explanation of AIDS nor has the virus even been isolated.

here is some more causes of death info, here is more death info. Its interesting because the last link because it puts wars, random human-to-human violence, drowning, traffic accidents, and diarrhea above AIDS.

Also, I belive that suicide is somewhere in the top 20 causes of death _across all age groups_ in the US, but noone cares about that.

I saw a show on animal channel the other day that was about the fastest runners. Number one was the tiger beetle. What struck me is that the reason it runs in short bursts is that its perception system can't keep up with all the input. So it has to keep stopping to get its bearings. Roaches are very fast too, and they use this same method of short bursts and stops. (which has the added benefit of making them harder to stomp. :)

Another example of this inability to perceive too much movement input is the funky neck movements many ducks make while moving to hold their eyes still.

PeopleSoft really does suck. My university (not to name names) has moved to PeopleSoft, and it has sucked since day one.

It was over 6 weeks before I and other new-hires got paid -- at one point, the boss was going cut us personal checks so we could pay our bills.

I still haven't been paid for all the time I have worked, and direct deposit still doesn't work.

So, yeah. I get paper checks and make backup paper timecards, because otherwise, I'd be screwed.

Oracle can't be worse...

...so I, for one, welcome PeopleSoft's new Oracle Overlords...

My school has a mountain of bandwidth... tons of bandwidth.

Here's a list of anti-chomsky links.

How about a FRICKIN' LASER BEAM coming out of your bionic eye?

For all of you /.'ers out there there's an interesting new technology out there to detect these types of flaws. I'm a nuclear student at UF and some in our department are working on lateral migration radiography. It's a rather cool process, shoot x-rays into the foam and get an image of what's inside and find out where delimanation or debonding has occured. http://www.nre.ufl.edu/facilities/backscat.php

Just like I buy dolphin safe Tuna ...

Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics is on dodgy ground at best. See http://www.zoo.ufl.edu/gpryor/giraffe.evolution.ht ml

I only walk and ride my bicycle. In the last 4 years (since I gave up driving) I haven't used any gasoline (hydrogen, natural gas, or electricity) while going from point A to point B.

However, you will have burnt off calories that you otherwise would not have needed to ingest in the first place.

Along the way from solar energy to your feet, a lot of energy is lost. For example, aots are only 1% effective at converting sunlight for use in growing. And that's not even counting all of the farming going on, transportation, packaging, making the stuff into oatmeal etc. etc.

Here is an interesting link.

In case you can't figure out the energy efficiency, just enter something like 76 kcal / 4600 btu in google. It works out to a measly 6%. Imagine the savings if you used a car (running on hydrogen, perhaps) that was powered by solar energy somewhere down the line.

And that's for a vegetarian breakfast!

Sweet. Now I can have beer delivery when I'm stuck in a hospital bed!

Seated and at rest the body produces about 400 Btus per hour of excess heat which must be transferred to the environment. In contrast, climbing a steep set of stairs produces an excess of 4,400 Btus per hour. Since humans are warm-blooded mammals, the body needs to lose this excess heat because deep body temperatures must remain relatively constant at 98.6 F to prevent serious medical complications.

That doesn't sound right to me, I thought deep body temperatures were more like 100 F and that 98.6 was just an orifice temperature. But that aside, the point is that generally speaking we produce more heat than we need. This is true except when the ambient temperature drops below a certain point, of course, but in general we're radiating heat like crazy. It only makes sense to make use of this heat loss when possible.

One interesting point is lightning damage while sailing on fresh water the damage is worse than when sailing on salt water!

A long Video with really neat post-lighting photos at: http://www.thomson.ece.ufl.edu/lightning/video.htm l

Some good scientific works at:
http://www.thomson.ece.ufl.edu/lightning/SGEB17.ht ml
http://www.cdc.gov/nasd/docs/d000001-d000100/d0000 07/d000007.html

One interesting point is lightning damage while sailing on fresh water the damage is worse than when sailing on salt water!

A long Video with really neat post-lighting photos at: http://www.thomson.ece.ufl.edu/lightning/video.htm l

Some good scientific works at:
http://www.thomson.ece.ufl.edu/lightning/SGEB17.ht ml
http://www.cdc.gov/nasd/docs/d000001-d000100/d0000 07/d000007.html

I have some experience building robots. It has been a few years though...

Those sites listed in the parent are neat and some good starting points. But I have some more...

---BRAINS---
I might recommend something like an old HP 100LX, 200LX or similar, or maybe an old Pocket PC or Palm. A robot large enough to hold a real laptop will likely damage furniture and walls when it hits (and it IS a "when" and not "if). You are much better off using something about the same size/wieght as a PDA. This also means smaller (cheaper) batteries, smaller (cheaper) motors, and a smaller and lighter frame. The only downside is that you get less processing horsepower, and debugging is not quite as nice as using an IDE on a PC. If you really want to use a PC, I would suggest using a microcontroller talking to your PC over a wireless serial link.

If you have the money to blow and want nothing but the best, use a PC104 card and a wireless ethernet interface. This will rapidly burn through your cash, though.

One great idea is to have a small microcontroller (cerebellum) board handle the motors and sensors, and use an RS-232 link to transfer this information to your more powerful PDA (cerebrum), which will do the actual behaviors. If you do decide to use the parallel port, you stand a small chance of blowing the outputs in your parallel port if there are any wiring mistakes. Also, your IO is very limited on a parallel port.

---SENSORS---
First, scrap the webcam unless you are looking to do something on the order of a Master's thesis. The human brain is good at taking a 2-d image and exctracting 3-d information from it. With a webcam, all you will get is three matrices of numbers, and it will take some VERY clever programming to get anything useful from that. Perhaps the best that you could do would be to have a "follow the red ball" type mode. A camera is close to useless as far as obstacle avoidance unless you are in a VERY structured environment (not your home). Shadows can be very problematic to most algorithms.

As for sensors, check out this site. I should disclose that this site is run by a former professor as a robotics lab that I used to hang out at. Check their sensors page for the hack of the IR receiver can. This is one of the best hacks that I have seen in that it takes a remote control receiver and turns it in an analog sensor. Very cool.

---MOTORS---
The other great hack is listed under the servos section of the above web site, and will tell you how to turn a $15 hobby servo into a geared DC motor. You do not have to buy anything from there, but the documentation is worth a look.

Avoid stepper motors. They are not very powerful, and they are power hogs. The ONLY advantage is that they do not need gears.

---CONSTRUCTION---
And if you do make a small robot, the near-perfect material is model aircraft plywood. It is light, inexpensive, easy to cut with hand tools, and easy to glue together using Zap-a-Gap glue. The wood and glue are available at your local hobby store, and use a hack saw or coping saw from your favorite hardware store.

---PROGRAMMING---
I hate to toot my own horn here, but here is a document that I wrote almost ten years ago, but is still useful as a general guideline on programming robot behaviors. Also, check out all of the handouts from this web site, which is the main site for a robotics class at the University of Florida.

It should be possible to do a robot for well under $300.

I have some experience building robots. It has been a few years though...

Those sites listed in the parent are neat and some good starting points. But I have some more...

---BRAINS---
I might recommend something like an old HP 100LX, 200LX or similar, or maybe an old Pocket PC or Palm. A robot large enough to hold a real laptop will likely damage furniture and walls when it hits (and it IS a "when" and not "if). You are much better off using something about the same size/wieght as a PDA. This also means smaller (cheaper) batteries, smaller (cheaper) motors, and a smaller and lighter frame. The only downside is that you get less processing horsepower, and debugging is not quite as nice as using an IDE on a PC. If you really want to use a PC, I would suggest using a microcontroller talking to your PC over a wireless serial link.

If you have the money to blow and want nothing but the best, use a PC104 card and a wireless ethernet interface. This will rapidly burn through your cash, though.

One great idea is to have a small microcontroller (cerebellum) board handle the motors and sensors, and use an RS-232 link to transfer this information to your more powerful PDA (cerebrum), which will do the actual behaviors. If you do decide to use the parallel port, you stand a small chance of blowing the outputs in your parallel port if there are any wiring mistakes. Also, your IO is very limited on a parallel port.

---SENSORS---
First, scrap the webcam unless you are looking to do something on the order of a Master's thesis. The human brain is good at taking a 2-d image and exctracting 3-d information from it. With a webcam, all you will get is three matrices of numbers, and it will take some VERY clever programming to get anything useful from that. Perhaps the best that you could do would be to have a "follow the red ball" type mode. A camera is close to useless as far as obstacle avoidance unless you are in a VERY structured environment (not your home). Shadows can be very problematic to most algorithms.

As for sensors, check out this site. I should disclose that this site is run by a former professor as a robotics lab that I used to hang out at. Check their sensors page for the hack of the IR receiver can. This is one of the best hacks that I have seen in that it takes a remote control receiver and turns it in an analog sensor. Very cool.

---MOTORS---
The other great hack is listed under the servos section of the above web site, and will tell you how to turn a $15 hobby servo into a geared DC motor. You do not have to buy anything from there, but the documentation is worth a look.

Avoid stepper motors. They are not very powerful, and they are power hogs. The ONLY advantage is that they do not need gears.

---CONSTRUCTION---
And if you do make a small robot, the near-perfect material is model aircraft plywood. It is light, inexpensive, easy to cut with hand tools, and easy to glue together using Zap-a-Gap glue. The wood and glue are available at your local hobby store, and use a hack saw or coping saw from your favorite hardware store.

---PROGRAMMING---
I hate to toot my own horn here, but here is a document that I wrote almost ten years ago, but is still useful as a general guideline on programming robot behaviors. Also, check out all of the handouts from this web site, which is the main site for a robotics class at the University of Florida.

It should be possible to do a robot for well under $300.

It's a nice thought, harnessing the power of lightning. And it's true that there's a really high power output. However, the duration is so short that the total energy, in terms of kilowatt-hours, is typically on the order of US$0.20 - US$0.30 per lightning flash.

When we in the University of Florida lightning research group trigger a lightning flash, we use a $500 rocket to get that US$0.30 worth of electricity. This alone makes the whole process very cost-ineffective. Add to this the fact that there is not a good way to store that much energy that quickly, and you quickly realize that it's simply not practical to try to store lightning energy.

I'll be glad to share more information, if anyone's interested.

I don't know if Florida Tech is competing in it, but I know that the University of Florida did; a friend of mine was on the team.

Their website is here.

...Smell-O-Vision *was* a short-lived movie fad in 1960. During the 50s in particular the movie industry tried lots of gimmicks (e.g. 3D) to counter the rising popularity of TV. The only one that really took hold (unfortunately in the view of many directors) was widescreen. One would think that all the people pursuing computer smell attachments would have learned from that experience.

Your statement is false. I currently have my liver monitored for abnormal behavior due to the drugs a doctor has me on which can possibly damage it. So far, the drug has not done anything noticeable to my liver in the past two years. However, drinking alcohol has directly caused my liver levels to spike. How do I know this? I never drank alcohol before under a year ago. It took abstaining two months from alcohol to lower the levels down to what they were again.

Excessive water intake can lead to loss of minerals.

I have never seen a report on this about "loss of minerals". Water *is* good to drink. The kidneys filter out that which is in the blood. If you take drugs which are carried by the blood, you will pee them out. Ask anyone who's taken sulfa drugs. Too much water will lead to a state much like inebriation, not mineral loss. See here.

UF Study Finds Specialty Coffee's Caffeine Content Capricious. Worst headline ever.

First, Koolio - the beer delivering robot, and now this!?

Apparently "yes, so".

A quick google comes up with:

A presentation by a law professor laying out general prior art requirements.

No offense, but "from what I've heard" is not very authoritative. Please provide information to the contrary.

Where I work, whenever we think a patent is invalid (all the time, if it's not our client), we search for prior art over a year before the filing date of the patent. Finding some is critical to our case because the inventor cannot claim that he was the first to invent. On the flip side, if you were the inventor, wouldn't you make every argument that there was no prior art for up to a year before your filing (since losing would mean you would lose the right to your invention?) You would do everything you could (produce dated lab notebooks, files, etc) to show that you invented your invention first. It happens in every patent invalidity litigation.

-truth

the interesting thing about turing machines though is how they are maximal and nothing additional makes the turing machine more powerful (like non-determinism, multiple tapes, two way tapes, etc) because those can all be simulated with a regular turing machine using an algorithm adjustment.

This is also know as the Church-Turing thesis. While not obvious, it is really a statement about physics. Building a machine that is more powerful than a Turing machine depends on what tools I have to build the machine. This depends on the laws of physics. Therefore this question will never be mathematically proven since, like all laws of physics, it is empirical.

However, if you assume a particular model of physics is true then it is possible to prove the Church-Turing thesis. There is a paper by Warren D. Smith that shows that the Church-Turing thesis does not hold for a model of Newtonian mechanics. In another paper, he shows the thesis does hold in a simple quantum mechanical model.

Self-Restraint Documentation Project

KFG

It's pretty sad that every semester in IMDL some numbskull has to do a project glorifying binge drinking (like the shotbot) in this class. Yes, we know, you're in college, and you must drink because of all the "stress", but show a little creativity for christsakes. The animal house cliche is played out. How many drunk frat boys need to fall of the roof and die before people get it?

Koolio was conceived as part of the Intelligent Machines Design Laboratory, a graduate-level class here at the University of Florida in which students spend an entire semester developing their own robots to perform various tasks. The IMDL just had a media expo a couple of days back, and you can find more pictures and information about Koolio and the other robots at the following address:

Mark