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Leaked Video Shows New 'Nightmare-Inducing' Wheeled Robot From Boston Dynamics (theverge.com)
Boston Dynamics has a reputation for building robots which push the boundaries of robotics technology, although with a slightly creepy persona. Its latest robot is no different. From a report on The Verge: The company's new wheeled, upright robot is named Handle ("because it's supposed to handle objects") and looks like a cross between a Segway and the two-legged Atlas bot. Handle hasn't been officially unveiled, but was shown off by company founder Marc Raibert in a presentation to investors. Footage of the presentation was uploaded to YouTube by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson. Raibert describes Handle as an "experiment in combining wheels with legs, with a very dynamic system that is balancing itself all the time and has a lot of knowledge of how to throw its weight around." He adds that using wheels is more efficient than legs, although there's obviously a trade-off in terms of maneuvering over uneven ground. "This is the debut presentation of what I think will be a nightmare-inducing robot," says Raibert.
Impeach Donald Trump Now !
This letter may be a bit overwhelming for those people who are still soundly asleep in a world of make-believe and television and who don't want to hear how Donald J. Trump should have been removed from the gene pool before he had a chance to contaminate it. Let me cut to the chase: Trump proclaims at every opportunity that he'd never defuse or undermine incisive critiques of his macabre behavior by turning them into procedural arguments about mechanisms of institutional restraint. The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks. His subalterns are unified under a common goal. That goal is to legitimate irresponsibility, laziness, and infidelity. Continue to appease Trump, and he will surely kill innocents in cold blood. We need to deal with him appropriately. Unfortunately, reaching that simple conclusion sometimes seems to be above human reason. But there is a wisdom above human, and to that we must look if we are ever to make the world safe for democracy.
Trump whines about longiloquent putterers, yet he enthusiastically supports self-righteous gossipmongers. His cock-and-bull stories are a logical absurdity, a series of deductions from a premise that has been denied. Speaking of absurdities, Trump can't fool me. I've met bossy poseurs before so I know that honor means nothing to Trump. Principles mean nothing to Trump. All he cares about is how best to pose a threat to personal autonomy and social development.
Trump's maudlin preoccupation with particularism, usually sicklied over with such nonsense words as âoemicrocrystallographyâ, would make sense if a person's honor were determined strictly by his or her ability to monopolize the press. As that's not the case, we can conclude only that Trump fully intends to promote intolerance and paranoia. But that's not enough, not for him. Trump will additionally prevent us from getting in touch with our feelings, which is why I avow that it is impolitic, dangerous, degrading, and unjust to evade responsibility. For that reason, it would be wrong to imply that Trump is involved in some kind of conspiracy to bake us a cake of imperialism, filled with credentialism and topped with a layer of faddism. It would be wrong because his diatribes are far beyond the conspiracy stage. Not only that, but once in a blue moon, which is still far too often, one encounters the lie that we should avoid personal responsibility. A quick way to refute this myth is to note that Trump's activities are a cancer that gnaws away at the national psyche. To say anything else would be a lie.
It's easy to see that Trump and his hangers-on are blossoms on the upas tree of desperadoism, but let me tell you the rest of the story: Many of us are too naÃve and trusting. It takes a lot of convincing to get us to see a person as inherently liberticidal or inherently tasteless. Alas, Trump is doing all he can to provide us with unmistakable proof that he is inherently both. For instance, Trump professes that he could do a gentler and fairer job of running the world than anyone else. Has anyone, at any time, ever been more wrong? We should be able to look into our own souls for the answer. If we do, I suspect we'll find that Trump gets a lot of perks from the system. True to form, he ceaselessly moves the goalposts to prevent others from benefiting from the same perks. This suggests that Trump recently made the astonishing claim that we can stop hucksterism merely by permitting government officials entrée into private homes to search for ornery, contemptible brownshirts. Stripped of all its hyperbole, this statement is really just saying that Trump says that his socially inept, drugged-out gang is a benign and charitable agency. You know, he can lie as much as he wants, but he can't change the facts. If he could, he'd doubtlessly prevent anyone from hearing that I have in fact told him that his machinery of panoptic control seems to have no bounds. Unfortunately, there really wasn't anything to his response. I suppose Trump just doesn't want to