Awww, who could stay mad at something like this?

From the SRL blog:

This is not the first time that the SFFD has been responsible for shows by SRL being banned both in San Francisco and elsewhere. In 1995 we were planning a show with Somarts that was funded by the BBC as part of a feature length documentary Pandemonium when the SFFD warned the then director of Somarts, Jack Davis, that any attempt to host an SRL event would result in the possible closure of Somarts. This was, according the to the SFFD representative, because SRL had ‘humiliated the SFFD in a prime time news segment that appeared on the Connie Chung show a few months earlier’.

The fire department holds grudges, but SRL are no angels either. It’s a no-win argument, I guess.

Full story, pics and video at SRL.org

It’s nice to see that the morphing robot has come such a long way since July.

We have a spiffy little interview with Zenta, The Man Himself, which you may peruse if you care to do so.

Everybody congratulate Bentern on scooping Pop Sci, then tell him to GET BACK TO WORK.

Delusions of Self-Immolation coats the skin of the willing volunteer in flame-resistant gel, then sets them on fire. Sets. Them. On. Fire.

This is the secret wet dream of the misanthropic deeply morbid machine-art loving soul of this author. It is goddamn beautiful.

From an interview with the artist:

There are three states on the machine which I call “rare”, “medium”, and “well done”. “Rare” means you survive without any wounds. “Medium” is more for, say, the SM session or for people who like pain to understand parts of life, or to have this experience of pain. The third possibility is death. It is possible to die in this machine; I just have to change the liquid, and I have to change the timing.

There is nothing that will make you feel more alive than art that can kill you.

[via the always superlative We Make Money Not Art and the lovely @evacide]

Wired’s Eric Smalley has an awesomely titled article about a Massachusetts based startup, Harvest Automation, is testing a small farming robot to work in nurseries in the horticulture industry.

The Harvest Automation robots are knee-high, wheeled machines. Each robot has a gripper for grasping pots, a deck for carrying pots, and an array of sensors to keep track of where it is and what’s around it. Teams of robots zip around nursery fields, single-mindedly spacing and grouping plants. Think Wall-E without the doe eyes and cuddly personality, or the little forest-tending ‘bots in the 1972 sci-fi classic Silent Running.

Thank you Wired!

They were thought up and done by the fine folks at Neatorama, who absolutely *promised* they would take the electrodes off my chihuahua and get my power tools back from the scrapyard the very *minute* I told EVERYONE I KNOW about them! Whee!!

There are many cute robots to chose from, they do jolly dances as you make your morning tea! Love them and their nutty boltiness!

Please write to them and say that you just love their steampunk robots, and that you would like to buy them by the gross, otherwise their hands might slip and HAHAHAHAHA OOPS CRISPY @LILFOO! Hahaha! those wacky, wacky Neatorama guys. Wacky.

Oh god please help they have my dog and my mig welder

A new installment to the Deus Ex series has been released, and to celebrate the launch Rob Spence was commissioned to report back on the current state of bionic prosthetics.

Rob Spence lost his right eye and replaced it with a video camera, earning the self-proclaimed cyborg the nickname of Eyeborg!

The video contains a good deal of game footage of Deus Ex: Human Revolution in order to compare the cybernetics in the game to their closest real counterparts.

DISCLAIMER: Skip to 0:16 if you want to avoid footage of Rob Spence’s eye being operated on.

Enjoy:

We <3 Robot Japan so flippin’ hard, we are eager for their presence at RoboGames 2012!

Thanks Robots Dreams!

Evan Ackerman over at IEEE has written an interesting blog post about the Swarmanoid project.

The swarmanoid robots consist of three types, each specializing in specific tasks: hands, feet, and eyes. When their powers combine they turn into an unstoppable machine on a mission to steal your valuables.

It’s the dramatic on-pull of the sensory vest that gets me every time.

Thanks Science Seminars for the link, also for the comment “It is creepy and sounds like a toilet.”

*It should not automatically be construed that The Rotor’s mysterious, regrettable disappearance had anything to do with the aforementioned exclamation. Although if it were construed, automatically or not, it could be neither confirmed or denied. All we know is that he’s gone and WE KNOW NOTHING, OKAY?