Monday, August 15, 2005

Elvis the Robo-Cat partially paralyzed cat HOAX!

UPDATE: I guess I’ve got to get cable again. Elvis was a Comedy Central skit--and I beleived it! I’m in good company; I gather Cory did too…

In my recent musings on the future I linked to an earlier augmented animals post based on a Wired story about a designer envisioning the use of specially engineered gadgets to help animals.

Today Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing points to a real augmented animal:

Elvis the Robo-Cat is a housecat who lost the use of his rear legs in a traffic accident. His owner, an amateur roboticist, has built him a motorized platform that Elvis controls by means of his front paws in order to move around the house.

The roboticist tells the story in this video.

Hillary “a stone cold lock in 2008”

Chris Bowers says “the ‘Why Not Hillary’ question will haunt every other Democratic contender in 2008:”

If any Democratic candidate is going to muster any traction against Clinton whatsoever, they need to answer all of the following:

• Prove that really are a progressive alternative to Clinton. You are not going to out-centrist her, especially in a primary.
• Prove that you can go through the Republican Noise Machine wringer and come out clean, like she has, but like so many other Democrats have failed to do.
• Prove that you can bring new voters into the Democratic fold.

Some candidates and potential candidates can answer some of these questions, but I don’t think anyone can answer them all yet. Until someone can answer them all, Hillary should be considered a stone cold lock in 2008.

In other Hillary news, here’s the first ad targeting Pirro. It features the 32 second pause from her campaign kickoff.

Wikipedia Works

A fan of Jamie Kane, an online alternate reality game from the BBC, posted a Wikipedia entry that others suspected was a viral marketing ploy by the BBC. Within 24 hours Wikipedia’s “hastily self-correcting” nature kicked in and the entry was amended.

Boing Boing tells the story. It includes the game fan’s statement:

Please do not use my edits to slander the BBC. If this were part of a viral campaign, the grammar of the article would almost certainly be better. I suspect the article would have been created at the same time as the game started also. Jamie Kane was mentioned on several blogs on Friday - did not one of you consider it was created by someone who reads such things? I’m nothing more than a student. I’m sincerely apologetic for purposefully omitting the true nature of Jamie Kane.

I say screen ‘em!

The TSA is considering relaxing security screenings of airline passengers to allow razorblades and small knives, limit patdowns and let you keep your shoes on.

It’s also considering exempting several categories of passengers from screening, including federal judges, members of Congress, Cabinet members, state governors, high-ranking military officers and those with high-level security clearances.

Educated Guesswork says that’s a bad idea. Here’s why:

[C]reating a complete exemption from security screening for one class of people suddenly makes it very attractive to be a member of that class. This raises the question of how hard it really is to impersonate someone in that class. There are 535 members of Congress and plenty of federal judges and people with high-ranking clearances. There’s no way that screeners are going to know these people by sight, so they’ll be checking ID. It’s probably not that hard to forge one of these IDs well enough to pass a cursory security check at the airport.

Even if we ignore the security issue, there’s an issue of principle and incentives. The current security screening in this country is fairly onerous and Congress is charged with overseeing that. If those restrictions are too onerous for Congressmen to endure, then why aren’t they too onerous for the rest of us. On the other hand, if Congress is exempt from these restrictions, what incentive do your representatives have to value people’s inconvenience appropriately?