Tetherd Cow Ahead

Tetherd Cow Ahead Advisory: Geek Alert! Yabbering about pointless fun with technology follows…

My friend Simon was given, as a birthday present from his partner Kerry, some tickets for a tour of the Sydney Olympic Park on Segways. Simon was kind enough to invite a couple of us along with him this morning for some geek fun.

The Segway tour of the park consists of a brief training session and then a fairly lengthy ride (or maybe I should say ‘roll’ because it is most unlike riding) around some of the facilities and gardens.

Here is Simon getting his balance:

It really doesn’t take long to get the hang of these uncanny devices. Two motors, one in each wheel, are controlled by microprocessors which constantly calculate the centre of gravity of the rider. To go forward you simply shift your centre of gravity forward; to go back, just transfer it back. When you first climb on, there is momentary hesitation because it’s certainly not intuitive to just lean forward without thinking you’ll fall flat on your face. But it takes only a couple of minutes to get the hang of the thing and it soon feels very natural.

I expected riding on a Segway would be cool. I didn’t expect it to be quite as cool as it was. The Segways are very responsive and the motors deliver serious torque. You can roll forwards and backwards, spin in tight circles, go up and down fairly steep grades and travel mostly anywhere a person could walk (even through doorways, which we did).

It wasn’t so much a tour as a bunch of nerds tooling around on a hi-tech toy. And didn’t we love every minute of it.

I’d like to believe that the Segway was going to revolutionize personalized transport, but I have to say I think, for the moment anyway, that its appeal is generally one of the oddness of controlling a vehicle by what almost feels like mental power. Because you don’t actually do anything, except shift your weight slightly, it seems just like you’re moving by simply thinking about it. It’s a real buzz. As a two-wheeled device for efficiently and quickly traversing the city with a low environmental impact, though… well, we already have one of those. It’s called a bicycle.

One of the surprises of the morning was to discover that Simple Graphics Man, ever the intrepid adventurer, had already been there ahead of us. As we have come to expect, his experience was not uneventful…

At least he was sensible enough to wear a helmet this time.

The Spitzer Space Telescope, which was put into orbit in 2003, is returning the most marvellous of images. This one, dubbed ‘The Mountains of Creation’ shows embryonic stars forming in the constellation of Cassiopeia, 7000 light years from Earth.

Tetherd Cow Ahead Assignment for November 11, 2005: tonight ask a friend around, pour yourselves a glass of good wine and go outside and drink a toast to the wonders of the Universe.

Hammacher Schlemmer is offering for sale a life-size walking and talking remote controlled ‘Robbie the Robot’.

Now there’s the Yuletide gift for the Man Who Has Everything. If any of you have a spare $US49,999.95 I’m sure I can wrangle a big enough Christmas stocking.

I’m sure you all know that Robbie first came to fame in the wonderful Forbidden Planet and has stayed in the zeitgeist ever since. The Hammacher Schlemmer replica offers, among other things the following features:

The robot is pre-programmed to deliver his famous lines from the original movie, and the remote control allows you to adjust the robot’s volume, track selection, and start and stop functions. Robby can also be prompted to move his computer relay assembly, rotate his servo-controlled head, spin his planetary gyro stabilizers, and rotate his scanners while his various lights flash. The integral audio system produces CD-quality sound projected from a directional speaker system in the head and synchronized with the neon tube lights…

He’d be a nice complement to my toaster, dontcha think?

Thanks to the Red Ferret Journal, where I read about this first.

Stefan Marti at MIT’s Media Lab Speech Interface Group has come up with a idea he calls the Autonomous Active Intermediary. This is essentially a device that acts as a facilitator between a person and their communications network. To this end, Stefan has come up with The Cellular Squirrel, an agent that sits between you and your mobile phone.

The basic concept goes something like this: mobile phones are very intrusive and distracting and integrating them into your personal situations is never elegant. So why not do something really natural and familiar to everybody, like have a squirrel take your calls!

This is how Stefan puts it:

The conversational agent is able to converse with caller and callee—at the same time, mediating between them, and possibly suggesting modality crossovers. It deals with incoming communication attempts when the user cannot or does not want to. It’s a dual conversational agent since it can converse with both user and caller simultaneously, mediating between them.

Oh, I can really see how that’s going to turn out…

Caller: Hello, is that Pete?

Squirrel: No, this is his squirrel.

Caller: His squirrel? O-o-k-a-a-y… can I talk to Pete?

Squirrel: What’s it about? He’s pretty busy.

Caller: Um, I’d really rather discuss this with him than with a squirrel.

Squirrel (sighs): Oh very well, I’ll see if he can talk to you.

Squirrel (to Pete): Hey dude, there’s some glue-sniffer on the line, too good to talk to a squirrel. Whaddya want me to do?

Pete: I’m busy nailing up this wainscotting, can you take a message?

Squirrel (to Pete): Sure chief, anything you say.

Squirrel (to caller): Well nuts to you fella – he says he don’t want to talk jive with no squirrel-hater. State your business or shuffle off to Buffalo.

I don’t want to seem like I’m completely ridiculing this idea. I can see how it could be really cool. One of the (many) things I like about Philip Pullman’s amazing ‘His Dark Materials’ books is the animal daemons that Lyra and her folk have with them always. I’d really like a little animal familiar, especially in this enlightened time when nobody holds silly superstitious beliefs that can get you hung as a witch. Much.

I kind of fancy a parrot, myself, it being in keeping with my piratical bent & all. It obviously leapt pretty smartly into Stefan’s mind also, because he already has a working prototype of one of those as well:

But for Stefan, the squirrel is obviously the agent du jour. I have to admit, it has some surreal cachet. I long to be able to say:

“Hey man, good to see you! We should do lunch. I’ll get my squirrel to talk to your squirrel and we’ll sort something out!”

Organic water? Huh? My brain hurts. What do they mean? Why are they torturing the language so? In the proper scientific sense of the word, water is profoundly not organic since it contains no carbon compounds.

The only way it could be considered to be organic, would be if it contained carbon-based life-forms. That is, things floating in it…

I think I’ll go have a beer.

[Thanks Sarah]

OK, so I was watching the DVD of the Jacques Perrin/Jacques Cluzaud documentary Travelling Birds (Le Peuple Migrateur) last night, and what should I see at about 8 minutes in, but the following sequence:

~Migratory ducks arrive in snowy landscape.

~Ducks settle down to weather out the cold and blustery night.

~Ducks awake in the morning. The blizzard has subsided.

~Ducks make many and sundry quacking noises.

~An avalanche begins and ducks fly away.

There you have it: a filmic record of a duck’s quack starting an avalanche! (Sure, the film-makers try and make it look like the avalanche startles the ducks and causes them to take flight, but I believe the footage speaks for itself. Go rent the DVD. Tell me I’m wrong.)

In further news, this site reveals that scientists at Sanford University have carried out a comprehensive Duck Quack and Echo experiment, so those nitpickers who scoffed at my own exposé (no names except to say Universal Head) can now go view a (sniff) proper experiment.