All Your Base

Not your pappy’s playground

Remember elementary school recess? Remember the sandboxes, jungle gyms and grassy hills? Remember the automated door guard with the 12-guage shotgun? Chad Person, an artist in Albuquerque, N.M., has constructed a survival bunker he calls Resource Exhaustion Crisis Evacuation Safety Shelter (RECESS). Buckshot R2-D2 was part of construction.

Person has spent more than $30,000 on the project. He’s stocked the bunker with 300 gallons of water, batteries and solar panels despite water and electrical connections. There’s an air filtration system. He can avoid flooding, capture rain water and dispose of waste. Fiber-optic cables reveal outside conditions and capture UV light for plant growth. The 300-lbs. steel door can take a blast from an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

To reach the door, one must best its guardian. Person crafted the boomstick ‘bot using open-source material online. He slapped the 12-guage together from rubber bands, pieces of wood and steel pipe. Person can control the sentry from inside the facility and feed two scoops of hearty lead to intruders.

Person is grateful for his wife’s patience through the process. I’m sure she’d be grateful if he just finished cleaning the garage. The project is for the best, though. Once the zombie invasion hits and changes music forever, the Persons will be ready.

Sprinkles and the second renaissance

Even shotgun-toting robots won’t always be reliable. The Matrix backstory begins with man’s dependence on machines. Some supply man’s need for power or transportation. Some supply man’s need for ice cream. The Yaskawa-kun, an ice cream serving robot at Japan’s Tokyo Summerland park, may herald our enslavement.

The concept is simple. Little Keanu puts his grubby mitts on a touchscreen. Yaskawa-kun smiles absently and prepares his selection. Keanu says “Whoa” and returns to peeing in the pool. He remains oblivious to the machine revolution.

There’s irony drizzled all over this. The Wachowski brothers, creators of the The Matrix, were partially inspired by Ghost in the Shell. This film explored the boundaries between technology and humanity. A Japanese man named Mamoru Oshii directed the film. Japan is a major technological center. Everything adds up to the automated, sprinkle-covered apocalypse. I’m going to start packing Go-gurts.

Who needs a telephone

The organic purge may begin sooner than we think. Hiroshi Ishiguro, a director of Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University, Japan is making androids. He’s developed the new Telenoid R1 model with help from Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International.

The R1 is meant to aid personalized, long-distance communication. It’s telephone-operated via computer webcam. The webcam picks up the user’s voice and head motions. The user can affect other behaviors with buttons. The R1’s design is humanoid but generally featureless to make it relatable for any age or gender. It’s portable because it’s lightweight.

Also because it doesn’t have any limbs. Freakish half-length stems poke out where limbs would be. In a demonstration video, the R1 hangs on a stand and talks to someone. Its mouth doesn’t fit the voice and opens intermittently. It twitches its limb-stalks in the air. It bends its neck to give the illusion of nods. The thing looks like a deaf, mute alien with down-syndrome writhing in silent agony.

Though horrific, the R1 will never rule world. But watch out. We’re screwed if the machines stop inbreeding.

MOAR
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/07/08/cat.bionic.feet/index.html?npt=NP1&cid=mkt_out_tech&iref=obnetwork
http://weburbanist.com/2010/08/23/body-art-creations-made-of-human-flesh-blood-bones/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/seealso/2010/08/tech_brief_76.html

Sources
http://www.asylum.com/2010/08/31/survival-shelter-chad-person/
http://eater.com/archives/2010/08/17/japanese-ice-cream-robot.php
http://pinoytutorial.com/bestandworst/telenoid-r1-hiroshi-ishiguro-creepy-robot