Someone at work linked over to this video and it is amazing. It starts off kind of creepy - with a high pitched whining sound - but you can see that this is no ordinary robot.
About 35 seconds into the video is the first particularly interesting part. A guy gives the robot a shove with his foot. The robot weighs 235 pounds and is carry another 340 pounds - you would think the thing would fall over but it doesn’t. The strangest thing is that I felt bad when the guy shoved it - even though it’s just a robot (and it didn’t even fall over).
Then at about 1:25 in the video the thing walks out on an icy patch of the parking lot. It slips and slides like a dog or other animal would but manages to recover.
I’m not sure why I’m so amazed, and a little creeped out, by this thing.
I have a large collection of old home movies (films, not videos… well, I might have those too - or maybe Brian has those). For a while I’ve been thinking about how to make them available to people so we can actually watch them. There are services out there that will convert them - and the prices vary a lot. None of the prices are particularly low and there seems to be some controversy about which methods of conversion are best.
But, I figured it would be worth it to send off some reels and see what I got back. I didn’t have time to dig into my collection so the two I grabbed were fairly random. One is a fairly long one that seems to be centered around Grampa at the Academy - I think near the time of graduation (although there are beach scenes and Christmas scenes on the same reel). The other one was much shorter and contained mostly shots of Mom and a dog - some in Amberly and some at Princeton. I think that puts the film at 1968 or 1969. The interesting thing (to me anyway) is that the shots of Princeton just happen to contain the windows of two different dorm rooms that I lived in - what are the chances of that?
Anyway, I will bring the full DVD to Mom’s on Christmas. Below are some excerpts from both reels to give you a sense for the quality and content. Enjoy!
Here is Coral performing the song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Notice her baby sister watching intently from her play mat on the floor. Also, please note that we don’t usually keep a fridge in our living room - we recently got a new fridge and that’s the old one (which is currently for sale on Craigslist).
