Patent diagrams by Donald Spector from 1988 and 1999 respectively: The top one is for an inflatable doll that expands when taken out of its test tube. The bottom one is for something called the Mommy Box that provided a ‘soothing’ video link to mother for distressed babies. These diagrams make a lot more sense [...]

Back in Prague after a long, rainy, fun-filled weekend in my favorite city. Some visual impressions from the trip: Cute. Alien. Meticulous. Silly. Cool. Disturbing, at best. Austere. Eerily lifelike. Ahmadinejad? Pensive. Back to silly. Only regret is that I didn’t have time to make it to Taqueria Dolores.

Ever find yourself in a conversation with, say, 10 or so people where somebody brings up astrology? This happened during my recent trip to Poland and I noted how the group reaction is always pretty much the same (so long as you’re among a reasonably average cross-section of people and not, say, hanging out at [...]

I was just talking about this with a friend, so I was happy to randomly come across photos of it via shorpy.com. It’s somewhat in the same vein as the Harris 20th Century Railroad Attachment in the sense of My god, I can’t believe this was commonplace one hundred years ago. Prior to the advent [...]

This year is the 100th anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto, when F.T. Marinetti (the self-proclaimed ‘most modern man in Europe’ at the time) introduced his cult of dynamism to the world through a combination of incendiary rhetoric, genius publicity stunts and Fascist agitating. The Futurists were fascinated by speed, technology, war, Moussellini, masculinity, action and [...]

After reading Krafty’s Blues Brothers post a second time, I now realize he didn’t mean to say that there are thematic similarities between The Blues Brothers and Star Wars (just that both are highly imitated)… but this is how I took it on first reading, and it got me thinking: Land Cruiser = Blues Mobile [...]

Dan’s Robot Double post reminded me of one of my new favorite terms, “The Uncanny Valley.” It’s a hypothesis that humans have an instinctive response of revulsion to facsimiles of themselves. The “valley” is based on the idea that if you encounter a very crude and not-really-that-human-like robot, you are OK with it, but at [...]

Spring is always the most listless semester in my teaching gig. Energy is low, weather is good, and class attendance basically collapses once the beer gardens open in mid-April. One weeknight not long ago, I was feeling uninspired to teach one of my more droopy classes, and remembered my robot doubles concept from many years [...]