Hive Mind: Morning Report 01/14/14
"Robots are interesting because they exist as a real technology that you can really study - you can get a degree in robotics - and they also have all this pop-culture real estate that they take up in people's minds." - Daniel H. Wilson
Pictured Above: A NASA astronaut during a seven-hour, 24-minute spacewalk of extravehicular activity as construction and maintenance continue on the International Space Station, this mission's specific interest to work on the robotic arm.
Relevant and less-than-relevant goings on from around the interwebs:
- Science Guy: Seth MacFarlane to reboot Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey with new host Neil deGrasse Tyson. [LATimes]
- Mind Over Ma... ?: The science between meditation and spacing out. [NYT]
- Under the Hood: On-board technology to drive car industry cashflow. [Bloomberg]
- Hive Mind: Robots to test RoboEarth, which is basically their own Wikipedia. [BBC, Motherboard]
- Meanwhile, the science behind our own defeatist attitudes, and how it's just another part to being human. [Fast.Co]
- Flies on the Wall: Google buys big with Nest Labs, makers of smart thermostats, and creeps further into your home and lives. And reasons why the up-and-up company took the deal. We'd suppose money has something to do with it? Additionally, why it might have been a bad idea. [WSJ, NYT, Forbes]
- 2013, An Illustration Of: A visual representation of #20things that happened on the internet this past year. [Sygyzy]
- We Think We're Turning Japanese: We really think so. America's iconic Beam purchased by Asian Suntory Holdings. But that's not necessarily a bad thing — Japan knows what they're doing. [PolicyMic, Esquire]
Also, did you know... “Robot” comes from the Czech word robota, meaning“drudgery,” and first appeared in the 1921 play R.U.R. The drama ends badly: machines rise up and kill their creators, leaving but one sole survivor. [Discover]