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Robotic Bins and Benches in Cambridge
OldBus writes "According to the BBC robotic bins and benches have been installed in Cambridge. According to the article, they 'move and chuckle' and 'sing when the sun comes out.'" From the article: "Mr Bogen hopes the cutting edge technology would help keep the bins and benches safe from theft. The Junction has a three year maintenance contract with Greyworld and plans to name all the bins and benches individually to make carrying out repairs easier."
I'd be more likely to steal a bin or bench that talks and makes 'rude noises'.
Bins that sing and chuckle are going to be safer from theft? In what alternate universe does the article writer live in?
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
Seems like more activity than most slashdotters I know!
EX TER mi NATE!
DOC TOR!!
According to the article, they 'move and chuckle' and 'sing when the sun comes out.'
Yeah, but do they sigh contentedly when used?
Safe fom theft, yes. But this will not go down well. They're like twisted appliances from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. These bins will be a certain target for vandalism --- especially after they've annoyed the hell out of all-and-sundry with their cheerful singing. Pah! It just confirms what people in the UK have known all along: local councils are full of rubbish.
with making everything hi-tech? I mean these days you can get just about anything that is wired, high-tech, and overdeveloped. Its technologies such as this that are nice as an art, but fail to really push the bounds of technology since they have limited applicability. Who wants to spend 110 grand on a set of garbage bins? Not me. Not anybody I know.
While I applaud the effort for making it artsy and cool, trying to say that the technology is useful for anything else preemptively is well, marketing bullshit and hype. It's nice to dream but sometimes we have to all keep our feet on the ground.
...the doors on the "Heart of Gold" in the H2G2 movie... the ones that sigh.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
It's like R2-D2's younger brother, R2-D3. He wasn't as successful as his older brother. He didn't get to travel the world with Jedi knights, instead he became a trash bin when he fell in love with a bench. He might not have the glamor of galactic battles, but he keeps the streets clean in his town!
Bins with Genuine People Personalities... I wonder if there isn't now at least one terminally depressed bench wandering around Cambridge. Life? Don't talk to me about life!
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
..someone 'borrows' one of the bins and hacks it so that it has Tourette syndrome?
It'd be hilarious to hear and see the bins going all over the place with random movements shouting out 'Fuck!', 'Shit!', 'Cunt!', 'Bitch!', 'Dickhead!', etc.
Even if someone didn't take it to this extreme, I bet it won't be too long before someone does hack them to do something different from their original purpose.
Pretty soon all the chairs will get bored and then yelled at for not acting surprised when someone tries to sit on them.
...just because some stool that could sing handed you a sword doesn't make you king of the britons
"Help, Help, I'm being repressed!"
This artsy project was financed by lottery money (I guess the state runs the lottery in the uk too). So these art failures can be a good example of why you should not waste your money on the lottery.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Junction is five minutes bicycle ride from here.
--
Toby
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There's actually a guy here in Cambridge who sings and plays his guitar on the street. The thing is, he does it with the top part of a bin over his head. He's a real success with the tourists. I wonder if that's where these guys got the idea from.
This does have the makings of a Doctor Who episode. A bunch of cyberbins form a collective intelligence and stalk the streets of Cambridge in their murderous gangs. Only one Timelord can stop them...
How about robotic toilets to come next? You take a crap and the toilet goes "Thank you for shitting, have a nice day!"
For an extra few pennies, the toilet analyses your crap and says "dude, you really should eat more fiber, stop drinking alcohol and eat some fruit"
That would be a whole different meaning to "excremental humour"...
Well, let's see, err it is a little more open that an sbin.
Apparently, this is just what constitues "art" today. This article is straight from the horses mouth about it.
True story. In the late 80s, I worked for a company that used Macs. The guy before me set up the applications on Macs in a folder called "bin" because, well, that's what you do.
Later, I had a young go-getter working for me who decided this was too cryptic. Having learned about computers in the era of the PC, she had no idea where "bin" came from, so she relabelled all those folders to "Bin of Applications".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
steal pointless crazy stuff like this, they have no re-sale value (I doubt the components are that expensive, most of the £110k was probably development time and research etc.). Then I saw this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/10/kidnapped_ dalek/
Somebody stole a pointless crazy thing (e.g. a rare original dalek from the Dr.Who series) and their trying to ransom it back..
Putting £110 worth of equipment anywhere in most places in the UK and not bolting it to the ground is always a bad thing...
Cambridge is a student town you know...it doesnt matter if its bolted down and given whirling blades of death...
Which is to say never.
Today, I put on my SKI JUMPER at 12 noon for a short trip outside because it's cold and cloudy. At least it's not raining. Yet. In theory, this is June. In practice, this might pass for february.
In other Cambridge news, there was the recent environment-saving plan: just reduce trash collection frequency (with no corresponding decrease in council tax). This is why I throw my trash into the Cam at night.
They aren't real bins (they're an art installation). You can't put rubbish in them. There are going to be signs saying "please don't feed the bins".
I live in the Cam!
When the mac was upgraded to OS X, did those old apps get relabelled again to 'Has bin applications'?
After all, the sun never sets on the british empire, right?
The Japanese build robotic exoskeletons straight out of Mobile Suit Gundam.
The Brits build robotic dustbins and benches.
Typical.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Bins that sing and chuckle are going to be safer from theft? In what alternate universe does the article writer live in?
HELLO THERE!!! LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE TRYING TO STEAL ME!!! Would you like to know more about: Stealing, Robbing, prison, the cops that are coming from the left and were just alerted by me...?
And in other news,several of the town drunks have joined AA after the new benches were installed. George Albert, longtime resident of the community, had this to say. "I had been drinking pretty steady for about five years since I lost my job. I'd lost my family, my house and my self-respect, and thought nobody cared. Then one day I was down by the park, and fell asleep on this shiny new bench. The next morning I heard singing, but there was nobody there, just this voice singing the theme song from Annie 'Tomorrow'. It was like God was talking to me. So I said, "God, is that you?" And I heard, clear as day, God giggling like a little girl. All these things in my life -God's just been teating me! Later, as I was walking through the park, I says, to this trash can, 'Waddaya know bin, God still loves me, isn't it grand?' But it just farted at me and walked away." Other drunks report similar experiences in the park.
It's not the first time England has tried this sort of thing. It never leads to any good...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
when the bench keeps asking you if you'd like some toast.
plans to name all the bins and benches individually to make carrying out repairs easier.
I'm a little curious how they're planning on naming them..namingschemes.com
"Ok bench, I'm going to sit on you, and I don't want you to sigh in satisfation of a job well done and say it was your pleasure to be sat on."
...
"mmm hmm"
"And I don't want you to tell me how small my butt is today, or how wonderful a day it is, or mention how particularly stunning the trash bin is this morning."
"mmm hmm"
"Ok, here goes..."
"whew, not a sound!"
"IS THAT THE WAY YOU LIKE IT MR. BEEBLEBROX?"
Bender pumps the keg furiously, trying to get some beer, when he realizes....
Bender: Oh, wait. You're a robot.
Kegbot: Don't stop.
Bender: Ewwww....
Wow. When I read this article, all I could think of was "Blebs! They're making effing blebs!"
If you haven't read it already, And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon is a really great short read by up-and-coming sci-fi author Paul Di Filippo.
Gads. Forget the diamond age. It appears that we're intering the age of blebs.
Does the bin burp when it eats somebody?
Is the victim with or without clothing?
If it makes you think, it's art.
Would the money have been better spent on a thousand hotel-room quality peices?
(side note, what I like to do with a painting is envision the area outside the frame, from clues in the picture; like shadows, reflections, and structural hints, and other hard to quantify bits; like a painting showing 3 people, but there is a table set for four... is the forth person the painter?)
That's sort of cool.
:)
Now I want talking benches
Necessary cliche.
"Ahhhhhhhh"
~Doors on the Heart of Gold
Eventually we may see electric motor equipped dumpsters that take themselves to the dump, with an empty coming in at the same time to replace it for the week. If not all the way to the dump, possibly to a nearby flatbed carrier that would take it down the highway and back from a designated meeting spot.
Larger trash bins on city streets equipped with wireless net cams could double as police eyes on the street and clean-up crew, and rudimentary robotic arms could pick up and dispose of garbage.
Your cat's automatic self-cleaning cat box could dump its own storage bin when full and then roll off to another spot, perhaps wherever the cat happens to be for its convenience.
Really cool would be a cubicle-less office with wide open floors and much smaller kioskified desk/chair assemblies that came over to you when you called, and could even carry you like an electric scooter to another area of the complex.
And of course we could use mall robots that were programmed with the current inventory of every store and could answer basic questions of people looking for something and direct them to it, roving around helping all day.
There's a lot we could do with this sort of technology. Combined with rudimentary AI and A-Life code, Internet based sharing of learning files including speaker-independent voice recognition (ask yourself why every voice recognition app hasn't been sharing your app's learned information with others and synthesizing a superior recognition database for years; no paranoids, I mean the raw recognition modelling database and not recorded words of yours), and proper useful tasks, we could see rapid successful adoption.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Might one suppose the same relation between /usr/bin and /usr/sbin? Seems likely. If this is the case, /usr/bin must be more open than /bin, eh ? Else how would you get the usrs inside? Of course everything is possible - one remembers the year when Mum bought a turkey which was too big for the oven. We found this brick and we were able to "arrange" the turkey so as to have it fit. Could this solution be used to "arrange" some of the more "unfit" users ? There are days when I ..... and I could sing too. Just a thought, excuse it please. Sorry.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
I can see it now. Every so often all the bins and benches will reorganise them selves into different patterns. In unison they will all say "WILL THE FUNG SHUI CLUB STOP REORGANIZING THE BINS AND BENCHES!!!", and over in one corner a bin is running around going "I CAN'T FIND MY CHI! I CAN'T FIND MY CHI! EEEEEE!!!"
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?