Bobbing for ramblings for Bob to blog on...
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Can robots become our ‘phriends’?
blogs.zdnet.com
a EU-funded project, Phriends — short for ‘Physical Human-Robot Interaction: DepENDability and Safety’ — has started to force robots to respect Asimov’s laws.
cordis.europa.eu
In a nutshell, these laws say that robots cannot cause harm to humans and that they have to obey us.
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1,500 ships to fight climate change
blogs.zdnet.com
Flettner rotor ship (1926) 
Conceptual Flettner spray vessel 
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Tired of Google Search? Try SearchMe searchme.com
blogs.zdnet.com
Besides having a photo and video view, SearchMe has something called Stacks.
You can drag and drop videos, photos, and search results into a little bin at the top and save it for later. You can even embed this into your blog.
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First synthetic tree mimics transpiration
blogs.zdnet.com
As you can see, “the synthetic tree doesn’t look much like a tree at all. It consists of two circles side by side in the gel, patterned with evenly spaced microfluidic channels to mimic a tree’s vascular system. In nature, trees use water in tubular tissues, called xylem, like ropes that pull more water out of the ground, delivering it to leaves.” Abraham Stroock, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and graduate student Tobias Wheeler “used pHEMA hydrogel, or polyhydroxyethyl methacrylate, to form the plant membranes. The hydrogel is a solid embedded with water and has nanometer-scale pores. The material acts as a wick by holding liquid in the pores, through which capillary action creates tension in the water.”
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Yahoo Open: Finally, a real answer to Google
news.cnet.com
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Are browsers the answer for the 3-D Web?
blogs.zdnet.com
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Feedburner, a stat counter on blogs, can be hazardous to self-esteem
blogs.zdnet.com
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Data center powered and cooled by the ocean.
blogs.zdnet.com
Google is pondering an offshore floating data center that could be powered and cooled
by the ocean. The logistics of making this rollout happen are daunting. But Google has
the capital to make it work.
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Immersive Cocoon: The Answer for the 3-D Internet?
blogs.zdnet.com
a carbon fiber shell that surrounds the user in a 360o display.
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Learning the programmer’s craft blogs.zdnet.com
... it started me wondering, “How did we learn this stuff ?”
I ended up in programming by accident, as many did [after] work, I’d go home and try and look up what [programmers did] at the local computer bookshop. (This was way, way, before the Internet and easy search engine availability.)
... when I asked him how he’d learned C, he told me he’d picked up a little book called “The C Programming Language” by Kernigan and Richie (who were the original authors of the language) and it was pretty simple once he’d read that. Anyone who has read this book themselves will realize just how good this guy really was, as it’s an incredibly terse read. It tells you everything you need to know about C, but only once. No repetitions, not much in the way of examples and a crisp and functional style. But it’s one of the classics of computer science literature.
Which brings me to my next point.
Read the right books
I ended up buying a lot of crap too. The problem is (and to a large extent still is) that it’s hard to evaluate books or text to discover if they’re any good until you’ve read them and tried to implement the techniques they’re talking about. A lot of books look good on the surface, but actually are rubbish in disguise. How do you determine the wheat from the chaff? ... I look at the section on signal handling (sorry for getting technical here but there’s no other way to describe this). As signals are synchronous (like threads) and so if you ever see a printf() call in a signal handler to demonstrate it being invoked, hurl the book across the bookshop with great force and never buy anything from that author again. It’ll teach you to write code that will randomly fail in the real world.
I worked a lot of hours, got issued a lot of worthless stock and got burned by many sleazy venture capitalists but more importantly I learned a lot about the incredibly interesting job of computer programming...
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