midwest vs. bay area

In March, I stumbled upon a noteworthy license plate in San Francisco, CA.





Shall we contrast this (plate / vehicle make & model) with the one I recently saw in Evanston, IL? You're not going to find many of these in the Bay Area.

kill ur TV

A license plate in Berkeley, CA....


I'm guessing they support TV Turn-Off Week...?

dog drinking fountain

At Aquatic Park, Berkeley, CA...

pleo - part pet, part robot

There is a new toy in town, Pleo brought to you by Ugobe. This company's inventor and co-founder is Caleb Chung, the same guy who co-invented the Furby 1n 1998. Pleo has 14 motors and six processors (Furby had one of each), a nose-mounted camera and 30 sensors. It's sensitive to touch, noise, movement, and even other Pleos.

Pleo is a lovable one week old baby Camarasaurus, a gentle and loving plant eating dinosaur from the late Jurassic Period of our planet’s history. Ugobe used and researched actual Camarasaurus fossil records to help them model Pleo’s appearance and behavior. (source)

The news releases started in 2005, with its much-delayed release happening on December 18, 2007. This robotic pet costs $349, but current owners seem to think its worth it. People are obsessed with these! There are Pleo videos, songs, skits.... owners can even keep a Plog about their robotic pet.

In this March 13th, 2008 Nightline episode, newscasters describe Pleo as "straddl[ing] the line between pet and product."



You can get a tour of the Ugobe labs, in this first webisode in the Ugobe series of videos titled "Behind The Scenes: The Making of Pleo."

You can see the rest of the videos in this 6 video series by visiting the website.

Pleo is based on the three laws of Ugobe life forms.

The life form should...
1. ... feel and convey emotions
2. ... become aware of itself and its environment
3. ... learn and develop over time

Isaac Asimov, who is credited for coining the term robotics in his short story Runaround published in 1942, also had his famous 3 laws of robotics (which Pleo appears to follow):

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

(He later added a Law Zero: A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.)

Besides the amazing advances in robotics that Pleo displays, it is just plain cute. In fact, you could waste hours surfing YouTube for Pleo videos. Here are a few to get you started:

Pleo (without skin) at the Maker's Faire
Pleo making other animal noises
Synchronized Pleos?
Pleo riding on a Roomba

You'll notice that the people obsessed with these toys are adults. In fact, techies everywhere can rejoice in knowing that you can program Pleo using the Pleo PDK as well as a variety of 3rd party tools. "Complex Pleo programming will require a knowledge of the C programming language and a comprehensive understanding of Pawn scripting and the UGOBE Life OS." (source) Umm... that doesn't sound like the skills of your average 4 year old.

Where else would you expect this toy to be developed but California? In Emeryville, CA to be more exact. I drive through the town every morning on my way to work!

Talk about losing your cookies...

No, I refuse to title my blog post "Got Milk?" Although it is tempting. This morning, a tractor trailer loaded with 14 tons of double-stuffed Oreos slammed into the median and overturned. The driver was driving down Interstate 80 around 4 am from Chicago to Morris and may have fallen asleep at the wheel. I can relate. That is one long, boring drive.

Though I'd like to image otherwise, the video shows a rather tame scene. Apparently, all of the cookies stayed inside their plastic wrappers.

squirrel obstacle course

Who says you can't teach an old squirrel new tricks?

hippopotamus art car

I read a funny article in the SF Chronicle the other day. Apparently, this clown in Houston is obsessed with hippopotami and wanted to turn her Toyota Rav4 into something more hippopotam-ish. Eight years after she first got his name, Tom Kennedy finished her SECOND hippo-mobile!

You can check out Tom Kennedy's website for more pictures, plus the story of the upside-down school bus built for Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's ice cream!

gummy banana slugs and real slug weirdness

"The banana slug is a bright yellow to olive green-ish, slimy mollusk found in the northwest redwood forests and can grow up to 12". It the official school mascot for UC Santa Cruz."

I love banana slugs. And now, out in California, I actually see them. So imagine my glee when I discovered these gems of randomness.

You can buy a gummy banana slug from Candy Warehouse for $5.90. These sugary wonders are 5.5 inches long and weigh 45 grams. Or get a similarly sized candy mollusk for only $4.75.

But if we are talking random fabulous, buy your gummy slug from McPhee. While you're there, you may want to pick up some meat trinkets including a bacon placemat and assorted meat pencil toppers?! Or pick up an avenging narwhal play set or other bizarre types of candy!

Lake Quinault Lodge even has a stuffed slug?!

As strange as these fake banana slugs may seem, the reality of these mollusks is much, much stranger. Banana slugs, Ariolimax columbianus, are hermaphroditic, which means they have both male and female parts. This is not all that strange in the animal kingdom, especially among invertebrates. However, it's what they do after they mate that is unusual. Slugs generally fertilize each other at the same time, but because they can have rather large reproductive organs, one of the slugs can get stuck. The other slug then does an activity scientifically referred to as apophallation, where they... ahem... gnaw off the other slug's penis to get the slug loose from its mate. While this may sound crazy to us, scientists believe this may serve an important purpose. They slug who loses their male organ is forced to become female and offer up eggs.

Still need more banana slug science? Here's a coloring page.

chicago and san francisco go dark for earth hour

The Chicago Tribune reports that there will be dark spots in the Chicago skyline for an hour Saturday night when more than 160 downtown buildings switch off their lights. The Sears Tower, John Hancock Center, the Navy Pier Ferris Wheel, 485 area McDonald's and Chicago's theaters (Oriental Theatre, Cadillac Palace and the LaSalle Bank Theatre) all plan on participating by switching off as many "non-essential" lights as possible as part of the Earth Hour global campaign to raise awareness about climate change. The Allerton Hotel will even be turning off its historic "Tip-Top-Tap" sign during the night-time hours for the first time since the 1940s.

The World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Earth Hour climate change campaign is largely symbolic in an effort to get the word out about reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Although it can be a little more than symbolic. At the first Earth Hour in Sydney, Australia, on March 31. 2007, the site claims, "Over 2.2 million Sydney residents and over 2,100 businesses switched off, leading to a 10.2% energy reduction across the city." But organizers stress that Earth Hour is more than cutting back for one hour. It's about "taking a stand and thinking ahead about what you, your neighbors and your city can do to slow climate change."

Chicago will serve as the U.S. flagship city for Earth Hour in 2008, with Atlanta, Phoenix and San Francisco joining as leading partner cities. But everyone throughout the US and around the world is invited and encouraged to turn off their lights for an hour on March 29 at 8 p.m. local time--whether at home or at work, with friends and family or solo, in a big city or a small town. (main site)

Interstingly enough, San Francisco was so inspired by last year's Sydney event, that they created Lights Out San Francisco and held a citywide energy conservation event on October 20, 2007. For that hour, such icons as the TransAmerica Building, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate and Bay bridges and City Hall turned off their lights. To promote long-lasting energy saving, organizers distributed free compact fluorescent light bulbs throughout the city. They were planning the second Lights Out event for March 29, 2008, but out of solidarity, Lights Out has chosen to support the Earth Hour campaign instead.

Both of my favorite cities offer suggestions to promote energy consciousnes after the event - check out both San Francisco's and Chicago's energy saving tips.

According to NBC News, Earth Hour will "literally be a worldwide event. It will start in Christchurch, New Zealand, and then roll through 14 time zones and 25 cities in 10 countries, including Brisbane, Bangkok, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen, Dublin and Toronto. It will be the largest worldwide voluntary power down in history, according to WWF officials." Pretty good for an event that only happened in Sydney last year!

Some of the international cities choosing to participate in the 2008 event include Atlanta, San Francisco, Phoenix, Bangkok, Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, Dublin, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Aalborg, Odense, Manila, Suva, Chicago, Tel Aviv, Toronto and Christchurch.

Will you participate?

use less oil

License plate in San Francisco, CA. Not surprisingly, on a hybrid Toyota Prius.


Using the United States Environmental Protection Agency's ratings, the Prius was ranked the most fuel efficient car in 2007.

bring your own big wheel race in sf

Wow! I haven't laughed this hard in a while. For the last 7 years on Easter Sunday, people have gathered along Lombard St (said to be the "most crookedest street in the world" in San Francisco - pictured to the left). They come wearing a wide variety of gear and carrying a equally bizarre collection of plastic children's bicycles, most of which are destined to break when supporting more than 80 pounds.

This year, the event was held down Vermont St., which could be considered even more crooked, with much sharper and steeper switchbacks, though not quite as many (or as well landscaped) as Lombard St.

Anyway, it inspired my second YouTube video. (Shhh... I didn't get the musician's permission for the soundtrack...)



And, here's a great video from the 2007 race:

nokia morph nanotechnology

A student alerted me to a video on YouTube demonstrating the Nokia Morph concept phone.

This phone might be capable of being flexible, having a self-cleaning surface, detecting environmental factors, and harvesting solar energy. It is a two piece design that would use nanotechnology to accomplish these feats.

(image from Gizmodo.com)

One nanometer is a billionth of a meter or about the width of three atoms lined up next to each other. When scientists talk about the nanoscale, they are talking really, really small. Apparently, when everyday materials get down to the nanoscale, they start to do really unusual things.

Scientists hope to one day use nanotechnology to do things like build the Morph, clean up the environment, design drug-carrying nanoparticles for targeted medical treatment, design more effective cleaners, coat implants (like hip replacements) to help the body better accept the foreign material, design food that indicates when it is spoiling, improve car materials... the list goes on. The truth is, no one really knows yet just what nanotechnology may help us develop in the future.

It sounds like science fiction, but some of this technology is already in use. You can check out a list of consumer products that currently use nanotechnology. Antibacterial doorknobs, kodak photopaper, lots of clothing (including pants from L.L. Bean!), even a teddy bear that allegedly resists bacteria, mold, and mites!

Serious nanotechnology runs the gamut from things we can't do yet--so-called “spooky” nanotechnology like build-anything molecular assemblers and bacterium-size supercomputers--to things we are beginning to be able to do like diagnostic nanosensors and superstrong carbon nanotube materials. Then, there are things that are barely nanotechnology at all. Nano-Tex is a company that uses nanoparticles to make stain-resistant fabric found in pants and shirts from Eddie Bauer and others. (These clothes really work, as my potentially disastrous gravy incident last Thanksgiving proved, but they're not the sort of thing that most people mean when they talk about nanotechnology.) - Popular Mechanics

If you want to learn more, there are many kid-friendly sites about nanotechnology, including a free BRAINPOP video on nanotechnology, the Lawrence Hall of Science site, kids introduction to the nanoworld, and Nanooze.org.

Or you might want to watch this great 30 minute video on nanotechnology basics from UCTV: UC San Diego. These goofy scientists do a good job breaking down a very difficult subject.

The Nokia Morph was featured in the MoMA online exhibition "Design and the Elastic Mind". It has been a project of Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center.