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New Scientist’s technology blog has a cool post on robot jellies! This is real slick engineering done by the German automation company Festo, which describes its AquaJelly as “”an artificial autonomous jellyfish with an electric drive and an intelligent, adaptive mechanical system.” Some cool features include:
* tentacles designed after fish fins to maximize propulsion
* motion controlled by shifting its weight
* 4-arm pendulum that enables steering in 4 directions
* communicates with charging station, regulates own energy supply

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State Secrets: A government misstep in a wiretapping case. A New Yorker article on the Kafkaesque case of Al Haramain v. Bush. [Via Threat Level.]

Note that Threat Level disagrees with the New Yorker piece about the future of the case.

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If you’re having scalability problems and blaming it on a single technology, chances are, you’re doing it wrong.

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“People like you are not holding up the Constitution …” Or so said Major Freddy Welborn, Specialist Jeremy Hall’s commanding officer in Tikrit. “Last month, Specialist Hall and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group, filed suit in federal court in Kansas, alleging that Specialist Hall’s right to be free from state endorsement of religion under the First Amendment had been violated and that he had faced retaliation for his views. In November, he was sent home early from Iraq because of threats from fellow soldiers.

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If you dislike the new Dilbert flash layout, try this.

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Sun continues to pursue talks with Apple Computer to have Java applications run on Apple’s iPhone while acknowledging a third party’s efforts toward the same goal.

“We’ve expressed our intent to do this and our desire, really, to work with Apple to build a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) for the iPhone and we’re sort of moving forward with that,” said Eric Klein, Sun vice president of Java marketing, this week. The JVM could run Java applications.

What the hell is “sort of” moving forward?

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A picture named streaker.jpgEvery so often a beer-drunk fan will run on the field during a baseball game causing a delay while the cops chase him down. Back in the days of streaking sometimes these fans would run out on the field naked. Permalink to this paragraph

You’ll never see one of these scenes on TV because there’s a rule that the broadcasters are not allowed to follow the drunk baseball fan onto the field. If they were to broadcast the drunk fan, the theory goes, that would just encourage more people to do it, meaning more delayed games, annoyed players, offended fans and busted streakers. Permalink to this paragraph

It seems to me this very simple rule should be adopted by news networks when it comes to the most hideous attack ads. Permalink to this paragraph

Example. The North Carolina Republican Party has yet to spend a dime running a racist attack ad against Obama, one that McCain and the national party swear they don’t want them to run. But millions of TV viewers have seen the ad, repeatedly, run for free on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. This seems grossly unfair, and how does it not count as a campaign contribution? Permalink to this paragraph