Yearly Archives: 2016

Spear 1 Drone 0

At a festival in Russia, a costumed re-enactor was preparing for a mock battle when he spotted an aerial invader from the future filming the action. Footage shows the medieval knight hurling his spear at the camera drone and knocking it out of the sky. The spear thrower later apologized for getting carried away, although there’s now talk of making drone spearing an official event next year.

— Renee Montagne, Hurled Spear Takes Out Camera Drone : NPR

Posted in Robots | Comments Off on Spear 1 Drone 0

Robot Radio

Ian Kerr and i had a great time talking robots on WLRN’s Topical Currents. They’ve posted the podcast as Our Robot Future And Bizarre Circumstances To Ensue and now you can listen too.

Posted in Robots, The Media | Comments Off on Robot Radio

Best Line of the Day?

Brad DeLong channels Cosma Shalizi:

Haven’t you just constructed an enormous and pointless intellectual apparatus involving […], in increasing order of implausibility, speaking intelligent aquatic waterfowl, options pricing, Vulcans, teleportation, Bayesianism, and time-travel just in order to be able to say the obvious thing: “The probability of an HRC victory is uncertain: it might be as low as 0.45 or as high as 0.95, and we will be able to sharpen our estimate as election day comes closer”?

Well, I laughed. Maybe you just had to be there. Or read the whole thing. Note that the order of implausible events is nicely snarky.

Posted in 2016 Election | Comments Off on Best Line of the Day?

On Topical Currents Today

TC-Logo-smI’m going to be on WLRN’s “Topical Currents” call-in show today at 1pm, to discuss our book Robot Law, and the topic of robots more generally. I’ll post a link to the podcast version when I have it.

Posted in Robots | 1 Comment

Math Anxiety

It’s more dangerous than we suspected.

(“Ivy League economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight” … although he’s actually … wait for it … Italian.)

Spotted via Kevin Drum, Heroic Passenger Recognizes Quantitative Economics as True Threat to America.

I am wondering if I need a new blog category for “paranoia”?

Posted in Law: Right to Travel | Comments Off on Math Anxiety

“Harassment”

The NYT’s Nick Corasaniti says this ad from the Arkansas Senate race “could well become a blueprint for how other Democrats — incumbents and challengers alike — attack their Republican opponents by linking them to Donald J. Trump.”

Posted in 2016 Election | Comments Off on “Harassment”