Improbable Research

A book review by Nan Swift, Improbable Research staff.

Loving the Machine is Canadian science/technology writer Timothy Hornyak?s admiring look into the widespread, and deep, Japanese affection for robots. Hornyak also writes an entertaining blog of the same name.

The book (published by Kodansha International, ISBN 4770030126, available now in Japan but not until September in the U.S.) is filled with beautiful photos of robots and their kith and kin. A 12-image progression spread across pages 102 and 103 shows a twenty-year progression of one series of machines from a two-legs-and-a-crotch metallic walking machine to its lissome fullbodied plastic-clad descendant. The book begins with a quick look at early Japanese puppetry, hops, skips and jumps to a most impressive tea-serving automaton in 1796 (and much later, in 2002, to a kit version of same), and so on. Most of the book celebrates the age of industrial robots, toys, and much-hyped robo-animals and companion and therapeutic robots.

The book concentrates on the lure, lore and excitement of Japanese robotophilia. It dips generously into the relationship between robotics, fantasy comics, and style; and delves very lightly into the engineering behind and within the critters.

The Birds-Away Attack Spider? is a battery-operated device that will chase away damage-causing woodpeckers. Activated by sound, the spider drops down on an 18 inch string while making a loud noise.

That’s what the manufacturers say. They also manufacture and sell a special tool for installing the attack spider.

(Thanks to Investigator Lloyd Fricker for bringing this to our attention,)

“Many of these scents have been brought to you by Lancashire-based company Dale Air, who has for over 25 years re-created the delicious smells of melted chocolate, sizzling roast chicken, coffee, home-baking and sun-cream to the more pungent stenches of dragon?s breath, flatulence, an Egyptian Mummy and New York tenement housing from era?s gone by.”

So says a Popbuyer News report. Dale Air echoes that sentiment.

Elinor Lichtenberg was one of the very, very few undergraduate science students admitted to the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Now, several years after joining LFHCfS, she has sent updated info:

Here is a more recent photo of my hair. I am now a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego.

Elinor Lichtenberg
Graduate student
Nieh Lab, Section of Ecology, Behavior & Evolution
Division of Biological Sciences
University of California, San Diego, USA

(Click on the photo to see more detail.)

Alison Gopnik fans and orgasmic explainers alike recommend Gopnik’s study “Explanation as Orgasm,” published in the journal Minds and Machines (vol. 8, 1998, pp. 101-18). Many of them also mutter approvingly — though seldom in the same conversation — about Gopnik’s The Scientist in the Crib.
(Thanks to Investigator Bob Marshall for bringing this to our attention.)