Alright, this video is pretty awesome, and also pretty frightening at the same time. Basically, three types of robots work together (a concept apparently known as a “swarminoid”) to find a book and retrieve it.
Tell me you can’t envision these things taking over the world?? There is something particularly creepy about the eyebots and the way they move.
On the other hand, I love how much information they communicate just by some color changing lights. You can tell when they find the book, you can see the information traveling from robot to robot, just by a change of color.
Sometimes you run into the grocery store and you don’t have your little “money saver” card with you. Or maybe you’re on vacation and you hate to not get the sale price, but you’re not going to sign up for a store card to place you’ll never be again. Well, in that case, just remember Jenny.
In most stores they can look you up by your phone number. So make like Tommy Tutone and use 867-5309. It works every time, because some other ’80’s loser signed up with that number to avoid giving their real phone number. And you’re definitely not going to forget that number. If you think you will, go watch that video a couple more times. It will be burned in your brain forever.
It sounds a little crazy, and maybe looks a little ghetto, but the results are actually amazing. Each plastic bottle gives as much light as a 50 watt light bulb. Don’t believe me? Watch this video until the end, when they take the buckets off the water bottles. It will blow your mind.
The quality of light from the skylights is so much better than from the regular light bulbs she had on before that. And the whole idea is pretty great: they’re essentially made from trash (plastic bottle, film canister and a little bleach), and they have zero electricity cost to run. They might not give you light all the time when you would need it (at night for example), but even if they could keep you from using lights during the day, they’d be a pretty significant cost saver.
I’m not saying we should all be installing these, but they do have a time and a place. Obviously the people in the video seem pretty happy with them!
Nobody on the Internet needs less hero worship than Joss Whedon. He has plenty. However, I have always been a day late and a dollar short to the Joss Whedon party, so there’s no reason to stop now.
Although I was a very early supporter of the (now generally reviled) Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, I didn’t start watching the most excellent tv show until season 4 or so, and I had to catch all the back episodes on reruns, as well as catching up on Angel. I even managed to be late to the Firefly party, despite watching the first couple of episodes as they aired. I thought the show was terrible and stopped watching. Later, people told me, “You have to watch this show Firefly, it’s awesome!” and I said, “Ha, nice try! I watched it on tv and it was awful.” Well, it turns out that there were some issues with the show when it was on tv, specifically that the episodes were aired out of order. When I was eventually convinced to watch the show in the correct order (way after everybody else), it was indeed a pretty good show. And I’ve never even seen Dollhouse.
So, compared to most of the rabid Whedon fans, I hardly even register on the meter. Therefore, how do I find myself writing a fanboy blog post?
There are two big reasons: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and the musical episode of Buffy, Once More with Feeling. Here’s a guy who is a television writer/producer/what-have-you, and he’s written two distinct “musicals” that I would put up there with many of my favorite musicals. If you haven’t checked out the music from these, I would highly recommend it. Yes, you can tell they are a little more amature than a big budget production (especially in the case of Buffy, when the actors and actresses are not normally singers), but that makes them a little more endearing. And it also makes it all the more amazing that the songs are so catchy. (Heck, I started out hating the Serenity theme song, and even that eventually grew on me! Burn the land and boil the sea, but you can’t take the sky from me)
So lets give it up for a guy who has consistently provided smart, funny, quality entertainment since before I was out of high school, and who somehow managed to write a couple of pretty fantastic musicals along the way, with less to work with than a lot of people.
Shane Halbach 