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Technological News
People’s Emotional Attachment to Roombas Bodes Well For Inevitable Sex Robot Industry [Robots]
Mar 2nd
A new study shows that people emotionally bond with their Roombas, giving names and arbitrary genders to their robotic vacuum cleaners. And gee whiz, they can’t even sleep with these robots!
The study, done by Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, showed that 21 of 30 studied Roomba owners gave their bots names, while 16 referred to it as a “he.” People also like to help out the Roomba, pre-cleaning for it and even buying new rugs for it to clean up.
The fact that people are anthropomorphizing Roombas, robots that look absolutely nothing like a person, should bode well for the inevitable robots that are actually designed to Read more ...
Sugar From Trees and Grass Will Be Made Into Plastic in Next 5 Years [Science]
Feb 19th
Those scientist types have been very active of late, between making
ethanol fuel from orange peel and now tree-derived sugar being used to make plastic. Who’ll be first to make trees from fuel?
The latter project is being worked on at the Read more ...
Remainders – The Things We Didn’t Post: Three Funny iPad Videos and One Really Funny Polar Bear Video Edition [Remainders]
Jan 29th
In today’s Remainders: Laughs! Technology bloggers have already chewed up and spit out the iPad over the last two frenzied days, and now the humor websites are having their say. But the real revelation here, folks, is the polar bear.
Meta
After days of deliberation, the college graduates at College Humor have decided on their revolutionary approach to mocking the iPad: metahumor. In this video, the CH team discuss how the iPad has fundamentally changed joke-making, allowing funny people everywhere to access jokes through sheer intuition rather than having to think them through. It’s truly a comedic miracle. HUAH. [
Read more ...
Dear Mixtape and iPod: You Suck. Signed, Mix CD [Y2k10]
Dec 21st
Armed with stacks of blank CDs and the original outlaw Napster, I spent my college years giving and receiving mixes. As a member of the post-mixtape pre-playlist generation, I’d like to say a word in defense of the mix CD.
Everyone has a story about some favorite mixtape they had. Books have been devoted to elegiac tales of romance spooled onto Maxell cassettes—there are countless stories in this world about how each tape told tales of moondances and Lucy in the sky or colored girls who went doo-dee-doo-dee-doo. Read more ...
