Best idea of the week…a robot to attend your meetings.

Robot Weenie is Better than Humanoid Weenie

From dailymail.co.uk

Fed up with attending endless meetings when you’d much rather be at home? Step forward the QB from Anybots – a robot who can go to the office for you.

Developed by Bob Christopher, the brainchild behind the Pleo dinosaurs, the cute looking robot is essentially a teleconferencing system on wheels.

The robot can alter its height from 3ft to 5.7ft and weighs 2.5st, with a main computer and several mini-computers on board. It has an LCD monitor mounted on its head which feeds a webcam image of the telecommuter.

It ‘sees’ via a 5MP video camera in one eye, and a lower resolution camera on the head that points downwards. It ‘hears’ via three microphones that feed audio to the telecommuter, and has high-quality speakers for audio in the other direction.

Alright, nicely played. This thing costs 15K, however. I’m pretty sure I could do the same damned thing with an HTC Incredible, broom, Arduino, and an electric wheelchair motor. I would need an area to put some tattoos and earbuds, however. And somehow mimic my general sense of ‘leave me alone before I effin snap’ to be fully effective/reflective of me in a meeting situation. And a strong odor of coffee…definitely need that.

While I’ve been caught up dealing with the epic battle between the Moto Droid and the RIM Storm 2, there have been some slick phones dropping. FWIW, Motorola whupped the beans out of the Storm, whatever that means. Whatevs.

Here is one in particular. The HTC HD2.

Heroic

This puppy is pretty much loaded. Like I’ll be after this paid post…

Really though, this is a sweet phone. 480×800 res screen at 4.3 inches…we’re talking Eros stats. HTC Accessories are where it is at, though. You can outfit this guy (which runs Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional, for you Microsoft-eers) with all kinds of phone stuffs…hit that bump to find out more.

Long story short…I need to stay up on my phone current events. I’m still clinging to my seen-better-days BlackBerry Pearl. For the loss.

Have you ever wished that there existed a fruit that looked like a strawberry, only white, and tasted like a pineapple? Here you go, you sick weird-fruit-wanting-son-of-a-bitch.

nomnomnom indeed

Per DailyMail:

Seeing their juicy red flesh in the shops is a sign that summer is on its way.

But this year your strawberries could be as white as the cream poured over them, after a new variety went on sale today.

The pineberry is said to combine the shape and texture of a strawberry with a flavour and smell closer to that of a pineapple.

…

They join other unusual recently introduced fruits such as the strasberry, which looks like a cross between a strawberry and a raspberry.

Grown in glasshouses, the pineberry – as they have been dubbed for the British market – starts off green, gradually turning paler as it ripens.

When it is sweet and juicy enough to eat, the flesh is almost completely white but studded with red seeds.

Waitrose fruit buyer Nicki Baggott said: ‘Pineberries offer our customers the chance to add a new fruit into their diet, and the berry’s bright appearance can add an unusual decoration to sweet dishes.

Okay, dudes. New fruit. Niiiice. I think I’ll stick with my standard go-to, the coffee bean. Do whatever you want, though.

This stupid site is selling a very non-stupid item…the cooler chair.

I bet it could hold about 30 OMLs

It could be argued that the Snuggie pretty much wiped out any credibility our nation had. Snuggie and Crocs, I suppose. Well, twist that knife handle, because somebody went ahead and invented Pajama Jeans. I didn’t misspeak. Pajama Jeans.

creepy sexy robolady is creepy

^^^Tired of looking like a lazy dick at KFC in sweats? Pajama Jeans are for you, friend.
^^^Getting too fat, too rapidly, to contain your fat ass with denim? Pajama Jeans are Cotton/Spandex stretchy wonderment. Problem solved.
^^^Want to looks classy at the gym? Just kidding…these look 100% retarded, regardless of setting.

~~steps on soapbox~~~
I bet these things sell like hot cakes, considering the impressive rate at which people are throwing in the towel on basic social tenets. Pajama Jeans would, maybe, make for a good national uniform bottom for the average overweight, responsibly dodging, globally ignorant, Everybody Loves Raymond-watching, American “adult.”
~~~steps off soapbox~~

Who doesn’t like 3D? This ol’ gal certainly does. Or did.

lol-ing the shit out of some 3D

I don’t get the last joke, but Engadget reported the following:

Get your active shutter glasses ready: your PS3 is going to go 3D this Summer. In conjunction with the release of its 3D BRAVIA LCD sets, Sony is planning to release updates to turn the PS3 both into a stereoscopic 3D gaming platform, in addition to a 3D Blu-ray compatible movie player. Sure, we knew Sony was planning to give us 3D sometime this year, but now that we’ve got a summer time frame we can plan our wardrobe decisions according — jean cut-offs, here we come!

I’ll gladly wait for Visio to come out with a 3D LCD/LED, and kindly pay less than half of the price of a Bravia, thanks. Regardless, this is pretty sweet news.

The best thing to happen to ketchup since the upside-down bottle thing:

NOMNOMNOM

For maximum high fructose corn syrup intake, you can dip shit in this thing or go old-school and squeeze this shit on other shit. Now, we just need to clear up the whole ketchup/catsup naming conundrum, and we’ll be good to go.

The future is here, my friends.

I think Richard Branson is awesome. He basically does whatever he wants. Like inventing seaplanes.

I added the orange fish.

FTA:
Billionaire Sir Richard Branson may already own an airline, a record label, a mobile phone company, several luxury restaurants and a Caribbean island. But today the entrepreneur unveiled his latest toy – an underwater plane.

The £415,000 prototype submersible is called the Necker Nymph and can dive to depths of up to 130ft. Sir Richard hopes to one day explore depths of 35,000ft – which is far more than the height of Mount Everest.

My hero.

I love lasers.
I love weapons.
I REALLY LOVE LASER WEAPONS!

pew pew pew

U.S. Military…FTW! The latest addition to the arsenal is that bad boy pictured above. Optimus Prime laser, it is not. It is more closely related to the physics professor laser pointer, but way cooler. Like blind a dude from 2.5 miles cooler. Though it’s intended use is to act as a deterrent, I have money on the blinding thing. It is unlikely that the optical scope’s limitations would allow the user to keep that thing out of the target’s eyes 100%, and with a laser intensity high enough to produce a range like that, blindness would surely ensue.

The only thing better than laser-weaponry would be laser-computer-weaponry. Slap a *nix netbook on that sucker…guaranteed I would have one preordered. It would look something like this…

much better

I should add another frame of sad, since the swaperoo will have to take place at Wal-Mart. Boo.

i <3 za! nom nom nom

The problem at hand is essentially this:

"Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza - and if not, who will get more?"

The visual break down of the proof is this, in a nutshell:

Pretty slick stuff…NewScientist reports the details in a lengthy feature..

“He [Rick Mabry] suspected that someone, somewhere must already have worked out the simple-looking sums at the heart of the new expression, so he trawled the online world for theorems in the vast field of combinatorics – an area of pure mathematics concerned with listing, counting and rearranging – that might provide the key result he was looking for.

Eventually he found what he was after: a 1999 paper that referenced a mathematical statement from 1979. There, Mabry found the tools he and Deiermann needed to show whether the complex algebra of the rectangular strips came out positive or negative. The rest of the proof then fell into place (American Mathematical Monthly, vol 116, p 423).”

Awesome. I need to tear into the guts of this guy…pretty sweet (and asinine) math.

For the non-math inclined, here is a sweet picture of Freemo, the Talking Pizza. He is funny.

Unfortunately the swirly light thing over Norway wasn’t a visitor from outer-space. You crazy-ass Scientologists will have to wait for Xenu…turns out the spiral was just a little Ruskie submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) that failed..

Per the BBC:
“A Russian test launch of an intercontinental missile has failed, resulting in a white light seen over parts of Norway.

It is designed to have a range of 10,000km (6,200 miles), but its repeated failures have caused embarrassment for Russia which hoped it would support its nuclear deterrent. “

Great! Just a little SLBM mishap. Let’s just assume that Russia and the States are buddies (or over 10,000km apart) and get back to worrying about Tiger Woods.