A long but interesting article on the history, and current state of the art:

Cog was designed to learn like a child, and that

From a statement from members of the Personal Spaceflight Federation:

We will persevere

Some of us think of space heroes as only those who strap themselves into a rocketship. But people like these, who give their sweat and lives to build those ships, who take their families out to live in the desert and work incredible hours on tedious tasks to make those rockets fly, and who do so because they share the dream of an open frontier in space, they too are true heroes.

Rick Tumlinson in Space Frontier Foundation press release

Stop recycling. Or at least, stop mindless recycling.

Taylor Dinerman wrote a nice tribute to Robert Heinlein in today’s Wall Street Journal. He concludes:

In another hundred years, it will be interesting to see if the nuclear-powered spaceships and other technological marvels he predicted are with us. But nothing in his legacy will be more important than the spirit of liberty he championed and his belief that “this hairless embryo with the aching oversized brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure and spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency.”

Mr. Dinerman writes a weekly column for the Space Review.

Nice to see Taylor and Jeff Foust’s publication getting broader exposure.

Victor Davis Hanson makes an interesting point:

An ironic note: The agricultural revolution that changed America was not entirely a result of efficient machines, chemicals, and new crop species. Much of it was due to the end of devoting millions of acres to pasturage and feed stuffs for millions of horses. My grandfather told me that when he was small half our farm was used to feed the horses that pulled the cultivators for the vineyard and orchard. But apparently here we go again-planting land for transportation. And we should expect everything from ice cream to beef to rise in price as a result.

And Iain Murray adds detail:

Efforts to force-feed the U.S. corn ethanol industry are likely to trigger lots of forest clearing, but U.S forestland is of substantially poorer quality than its corn land. Our corn is grown on our best land, while our forests grow on our worst. Forest land is steeper, dryer, poorly drained, or somehow lacking

Are you technologically useful?

In Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “Midnight Sun” posed the conundrum (a riddle with a pun as the answer) whether the world would end in global warming or cooling. Robert Frost also pondered this riddle in his 1920 poem.

I think I have the answer: “Fire!”

The pun is that this is what you say to clear a crowded movie theater. Now that you have the punchline, you can get the setup in my column in The Space Review which is up.

It sounds great. There’s only one problem. It doesn’t work:

Despite apparently violating fundamental laws of physics, Steorn planned to demonstrate its machine to the public Wednesday at the Kinetica Museum gallery in London.

Steorn, however, ran into a minor problem — Orbo isn’t working.

Steorn posted a note on its Web site:

“We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting. We have commenced a technical assessment and will provide an update later today.”

Yes, of course. Camera lighting. I’m sure that’s it.

…rat brains:

The robot’s biologically-inspired control software uses a functional model of “place cells”. These are neurons in an area of the brain called the hippocampus that help real rats to map their environment. They fire when an animal is in a familiar location.

Alfredo Weitzenfeld, a roboticist at the ITAM technical institute in Mexico City, carried out the work by reprogramming an AIBO robot dog, made by Japanese firm Sony, with the rat-inspired control software.

When placed inside a maze, the robot learnt to navigate towards a “reward” in a remarkably similar way to real rodents, using landmarks to explore.

Very interesting, with a lot of implications.