Another Of Those Citroen Commercials

It was really, really popular for a while there to pass around those Citroen ads where the car transforms and then does something athletic. Heck, I'm sure I embedded them at least once myself, probably more than that, and a huge number of parodies and related material.

Turns out that there's a new one. I could only find the German version independent of other material; I don't know if there was another version.



I must admit, I quite like the classical music, although it still doesn't hold a candle to this, which is my favorite transforming robot dance sequence of all time.



And here's an animation of a transforming dustbuster trying to kill you!



Didn't have a lot of time for blogging today, you see, because the computer workspace had to be destroyed and rebuilt in my own dark image. I'm blogging for the first time from a nice, practically brand new computer, by the way (though its keyboard is giving me conniption fits).

-Signing off.

Robots Have No Tails...

...although ironically, I was just reading Stanislaw Lem's "Tale of the Computer That Fought A Dragon," in which a robotic dinosaur/dragon ate a computer to make itself a tail.

Robots Have No Tails is the name of a recently reprinted anthology of stories by Henry Kuttner (originally under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett) about an inventor named Gallegher. I don't have this collection (though I would rather like to), but I have read one of the stories in it thanks to a really big collection of oldish science fiction I have.

The story is called "The Proud Robot," and it features a hideous, extremely vain robot called Joe.

Joe pretty well makes the story, simply because he's a hilarious and thoroughly weird character.

One of the biggest reasons for this is because he's enormously perceptive. He has some kind of combination of psychic and hypnotic powers. He has imaginary names for most of them-when asked what one of them, vastening, is, he describes it as being "something like a cross between presience and sagrazi." "Sagrazi?" "Oh, I forgot, you don't have those, either."

I'd probably do a more complete summary of it or something, but plenty of other people have reviewed it, it's my birthday, and I don't feel like it. Go read a book.

-Signing off.

Children's Educational Books On Robots

Fact: The most exciting thing about the old How and Why Wonder Book about "Robots and Electronic Brains" (publication date 1963) is the cover. (See it here.)

Reading really old books can often give interesting perspectives on the present, and the ancient How and Why books (from all the way back in the '60s) is no exception. It is also a good way to actually learn about some of the basics of computing... although if you want that, there are almost certainly better modern sources.

One of the most amusing and idiosyncratic features of this particular old book is that it calls any random robots that are mobile and have work arms "MOBOTs." It seems to further assume that in the future, all robots that perform dangerous, exotic work for people will probably also be called Mobots. Sadly, there seem to be no references to the original Mobot on the internet, although Wikipedia redirects the search term to "mobile robot," which is what it's short for. (The closest thing on Wikipedia in terms of time and name to Mobot was actually Mowbot, the first lawnmowing robot. No joke.)

The book also talks about teaching machines, an amusing anachronism far less fascinating than its neighbor in that article, the pigeon-guided missile. Of course, the teaching machines described in the book are at least a little bit different than the ones described in the article, so I dunno.

Then there's the Robots book from the "Modern Technology" series. Published in 1986 (the year my sister was born), this book likewise focuses on then-modern ideas of robots and the then-near future. It's a bit less jarring in that respect, and itself almost quaint.

It's also rather boring.

Don't get me wrong-it actually has pretty good information on robotics and the like. It even has photographs of many robots that are obvious progenitors of today's sophisticated humanoid robots, as well as a picture of a "seeing eye robot." (It also hints at Japan's dominance in robotics, although it doesn't refer to it explicitly.)

But I find it a bit hard to believe that it could really make a kid excited about robots, especially these days.

There was another book I was going to talk about a little bit, but it belongs to my kid brother, and got itself thoroughly lost last week. Sadly, that was the fun one.

-Signing off.

Cartoon Profiles: Droids

So what do you get when R2-D2 and C-3PO are licensed to appear in a cartoon series?



Probably the closest thing to a Star Wars universe story that just happens to be a cartoon instead of a movie.

Now, that sounds like a no-brainer. But the recent Clone Wars stuff (both the Genndy Tartakovsky hyperactive cartoon stuff and the CGI-based stuff) weren't quite Star Wars cartoons. (Genndy comes closer. My only problem is that he takes the Jedi just a smidgen too far. And, well, most of them weren't really stories so much as extreme fight sequences.)

Even though Droids was really a pretty weird experience, my immediate conclusion after watching just one episode (I've seen more than that, but I'm generalizing) is "Well, that's better than I ever would have expected." The animation is pretty good for the time period, as this clip demonstrates.



If you ever wondered what it would be like to see Artoo dance, well, you can thank me in the comments.

But one of the fairly key things that this cartoon does successfully, and which really makes it for me, is the fact that it sounds like Star Wars. The recent Clone Wars movie which bugged so many people didn't bug me for a lot of the same reasons, but it did bug me because it all sounded off.

The "good sound" of Droids can be attributed to the simple fact that Ben Burtt, the sound guy for the original movies, was a big figure in the cartoon's production.

As for the writing itself, Droids was relatively unusual next to its contemporaries, because it had serialized storylines. Watching one episode of Droids is... pretty dumb, really, because you're just getting a little chunk of something.

Also, unlike the Ewoks cartoon it is associated with, it's a highly energetic series (or so says my sister, who watched a few episodes of Ewoks with my kid brother-I was busy elsewhere at the time).

So you could do a lot worse than Droids did.

-Signing off.

Positronic Brains

"Positronic brain" was a term coined by Isaac Asimov. (For more information on it, just click the ol' link.) While Asimov made many useful, interesting, and important observations involving potential future robots in his various stories about them, this is probably his least important contribution in and of itself.

Why?

Because the idea of a "positronic brain" is pretty much completely insane.

"Positronic" refers to positrons. That is to say, antielectrons. That is to say, antimatter.

So a positronic brain would be, even if it was carefully shielded, full of explosive material. Not a good idea.

A further issue is the fact that, since they're antimatter, producing the number of positrons that would be involved in positronic brains would probably be hideously expensive. (If you read the positron article, it mentions that somehow, somebody's been making billions of them; the necessary number for a positronic brain, especially as Asimov defined it, would probably range towards the number of the Avagadro constant or so. That is, billions and billions of billions.)

So, yeah, Asimov was a good author, but some of his technobabble is dated. Not surprising. (He coined the term around 1940. Holy cheese.)

-Signing off.

Awesome Robot Time

(Sig banner by my sister.)

Today, I'm going to talk a bit about a charming story called The Runaway Robot. Conceptualized by Lester del Rey and ghost written by... some other guy, it's an old SF kids' book. As the review I linked notes, many people remember it fondly for being a charming story about a boy and his robot, who turns out to be far more human than anyone thought possible.

This leaves me with several possible subjects. I could talk about robot rights, which is a biggie.

Or I could talk about the charming anachronisms, such as sending messages through space on tapes.

I could talk about how the "boy and his robot" thing is practically a sub-genre. (I even read a book years ago that would fit in the sub-genre while defying its conventions, where a little girl met a huge, surly exploration robot, who complains about plot holes in science fiction movies, among other things. Here it is on Amazon.)

I could even talk about how Rex, the main character and narrator, is good-natured and pleasant without being sickeningly so.

But I'm not going to talk about any of those things.

I'm going to talk about Rex's unintentional awesome factor. Like Robot John before him (or after him, depending on if you mean my personal timeline or the blog's timeline), Rex is pretty awesome.

While Robot John is awesome because he overcame his own clunkiness and tried to throw the foolish scientist who built him into a lava flow, Rex is awesome because he's a devious, devious guy.

Case in point: Rex can't technically lie. He's programmed not to. But, when faced with a situation where he needs to deceive someone, he can lie by omission. (He does so many times.) But that's only the tip of the iceberg.

At one point, he totally makes up some nonsense to distract some people. (Something like "Help! Help! A mad robot killed my whole family! I had a stick I was using to hold him off, but I dropped it!" Technically, that's lying-I don't know how his anti-lying circuits missed that. By the way, mad robots, robots that randomly went berserk, were a common element of the story. We don't see too many, but they're mentioned often, as they're one of the worst perils of the society. The reason he was distracting people was because there was a real mad robot out there, and some fools mistook him for it.)

Here's a real kicker, though-knowing he wouldn't be able to escape a ship captain that he was taking passage with, and determined to do so, he made fake serial number plates with his own and another robot's serial numbers, and switched serial numbers with the other (lackwitted) robot in order to escape. Those anti-lying circuits didn't define lying very well, did they?

Then, while he's walking down the street, he learns that Paul (the boy who "owns" him but from whom he has been separated by the plot of the book) is going to get in trouble for stealing him (even though he didn't get stolen-he ran away). So in order to ensure that Paul doesn't get in trouble, he uses a simple ploy-he pretends to go mad. (Mad robots usually just ran around like crazies, but reportedly they sometimes gained magic powers that let them control people and other things like that. Hence, if he had been a mad robot, he would have kidnapped Paul instead of being stolen.)

This was completely outside of any possible programming parameters he might have had (he started his rampage by punching a guy out, and he was programmed so he couldn't hurt people). Further, it was pure suicide-the only sane response to a mad robot is to melt its head off with a ray gun. (Rex was saved by the fact that he wasn't mad, but happened to encounter another robot that was mad-when the other robot tried to run down some children, he stopped it, and a police sergeant, knowing he wasn't mad, switched him off instead.) Anyway, afterwards (at the end of the book), he was taken to the company who built him, which was going to try to figure out what made him such a weird robot. And they were going to let him stay with Paul, too.

Happy sappy ending, yeah, but it's a good read. And Rex is pretty tricky.

-Signing off.

Robot Week

Last year, I had an "unofficial" robot week.

This year, it's official. (And also not annual, as it's not at the same time as last year.)

Um...

Robots are awesome.

-Signing off.