But then again, I also believe you shouldn’t give them opportunities to do so.
You’re going to want to watch this all the way through until the end, to see a human getting stabbed by a robot.
As everybody knows, robots are always on the verge of taking over the world. There are countless hours of documentary footage proving this, such as The Matrix, The Terminator series, and I, Robot, just to name a few.
So I therefore have to question the logic of these people giving a knife to a robot in the first place. On the other hand, the mission to teach robots not to stab or cut people, is certainly a noble one. I think this code should instantly be included in ALL robotic programming. I mean ALL people; today’s Roomba is tomorrow’s robotic overlord. You say the Roomba doesn’t have access to any knives, and I say yet. The Roomba doesn’t have access to any knives, yet.
You know how in the future we will all have little nanobots that do our bidding, like flying around in our bloodstream and repairing our body? Oh, you thought that was just science fiction stuff? Well, what would you say if I showed you a video of scientists using a computer to mind control 5,000 bacteria into building them a pyramid?
The future is now*!
*Now being like 20 or 30 years from now, when they can do more than build pyramids with their little bacterial slaves. But you have to admit, it’s a step in the right** direction!
**Assuming you think mind controlling bacteria to do your bidding is, in fact, the right direction, and not some horrible disaster movie waiting to happen.
It turns out, there is a door to hell, right here on planet Earth. Specifically, in Turkmenistan.
Seriously, that picture does not fully represent how hellish the thing is, although it does give you a sense of the size of it. I urge you to take a look at this quick video (34 seconds):
The saddest thing about this place is that it is actually man-made. It turns out that geologists discovered the crater about 35 years ago. It was full of natural gas, so, naturally, they lit it on fire. (Were these geologists or teenage boys?) Nobody expected the gas deposit to be more or less unlimited, and it has burned ever since.
Am I crazy that I kind of want to see it, even though it looks so nightmarish? It doesn’t seem like something you’d soon forget.
Certainly, the evening news is formulaic. When you are flipping through the stations and you chance upon a news station, you know instantly that you are watching the news. Something about the camera work, the type of shot, I don’t know. But you can just tell.
I probably didn’t realize exactly how formulaic it was, until I watched this video: the most generic news report of all time:
So apparently things aren’t any better across the pond, either.
Quite some time ago, there was a music video going around the net. The band was Ok Go, and the song was “A million ways”, A.K.A. “dancing in the back yard”.
[Edit: embedding has been disabled on this clip, so you’ll have to click through to watch. I highly recommend you do so!]
Okay, so 4 guys dancing around in their backyard for a cheep, but pretty awesome, music video. I really don’t think it would have been popular if the song hadn’t been good too.
But no big deal, videos like this go around the web all the time. However, Ok Go was no one hit wonder. Pretty soon another video came out, “Here it goes again”. This one became even more popular than the previous one, and established them as the masters of the “one scene shoot”, where they complete all the choreography without cutting the video, or editing. This video was even more awesome than the last, and you’ve probably seen it, though you might just know it as, “the guys on treadmills”.
[Edit: This one has disabled embedding as well, but if you haven’t seen it, you should definitely click through!]
This led to all kinds of things, and in particular, an appearance on the MTV Music awards, where they performed the dance live, with some awesome treadmills that said, “Ok Go” on them.
Not only is that video pretty awesome, but I really love the song. Again, I think that you can have the coolest video in the world, but if the song sucks, you’re not going anywhere. So the popularity of the video is somewhat of a testament to the quality of the music.
Time passed, and Ok Go disappeared from the radar. I don’t think anybody was really too surprised at that; that kind of Internet fame is like catching lightning in a bottle. They had managed to harness it not once, but twice, and they should be grateful, right? Wrong. Not content to fade quietly into the dark, they went out and made ANOTHER AWESOME VIDEO.
“This too shall pass” features all the usual stuff: a great song and one long take of something overly complicated. In this case, rather than an elaborately choreographed dance, it was an elaborately choreographed Rube Goldberg machine.
World, take note! Ok Go will not be ignored! They will continue to be awesome until you sit up and listen!
Shane Halbach 