Geeky Post: Soccer Simulator

mloss | Project details:Gird Soccer Simulator: "Grid-Soccer Simulator, is a grid-world environment in which two teams of agents play soccer together. The main intention behind developing this environment, is to provide a test-bed for reinforcement learning, and learning in cooperative, competitive, and mixed multi-agent environments. The communication between the environment and the clients is done through a text-based network protocol; thus, one can create a client in any desired programming language as long as that language supports networking. Currently there are several agents developed in C# and sample agents in C++ and Java, which can be easily extended to fit one's experiments' needs."

This should not be a startup

Robot engages novice computer scientists:

"Based on four years of educational research sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Finch includes a number of features that could keep students busy for a semester or more thinking up new things to do with it.
'Students are more interested and more motivated when they can work with something interactive and create programs that operate in the real world,' said Tom Lauwers, who earned his Ph.D. in robotics at CMU in 2010 and is now an instructor in the Robotics Institute's CREATE Lab. 'We packed Finch with sensors and mechanisms that engage the eyes, the ears -- as many senses as possible.'

Lauwers has launched a startup company, BirdBrain Technologies, to produce Finch and now sells them online at www.finchrobot.com for $99 each."

I really have a hard time with someone in an academic setting taking a pile of government money and then when they have something that they think can be a product decide to "launch" a "start up". Seems to me that all the risk was taken by someone else.

Flying by wire by thought

EEG headset with flying harness lets users 'fly' by controlling their thoughts: "ScienceDaily (May 6, 2011) — A team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students has created a system that pairs an EEG headset with a 3-D theatrical flying harness, allowing users to 'fly' by controlling their thoughts. The 'Infinity Simulator' will make its debut with an art installation in which participants rise into the air -- and trigger light, sound, and video effects -- by calming their thoughts."

Driftglass on Conservatives

d r i f t g l a s s: The Voice of Empire, Ctd.: "As if their Movement is anything other than a rat's nest of cowards and sociopaths."

Dick Cheney is Evil

Dick Cheney: Reinstate the torture program | Video Cafe: "Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that President Barack Obama should put waterboarding back on the table."

Happy Mother's Day to Your Mistress! Wait, What?

ThinkProgress » Family Values: Rush Limbaugh Encourages Listeners To Send Mother’s Day Flowers To Their ‘Mistress’: "LIMBAUGH: Mother’s Day coming up Sunday. Make sure the mother in your life, the mom, mother-in-law, wife, girlfriend, mistress, whatever, knows how much you care about her. And how thankful you are to have her. It’s one of these holidays they have the expectation, it’s there. It just is."

How to fuck up as an editor

If you've read this far, mention 'bananas' in your comment. - bengoldacre - secondary blog:

"Update: Annoyingly from comments it looks like they added the Bananas bit a little while after the article went live, though it still took a while for people to mention them after they added it (eg there's an hour between 'last edit' and first mention). Even so, boo."

And to be clear I am talking about the editor at Ars Technica