I live in the future, but I’m not a clone, or a hologram, or anything exciting like that.

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Smelly Robot Eats Flies to Generate Its Own Power

LONDON (Reuters) – British scientists are developing a robot that will generate its own power by eating flies.

The idea is to produce electricity by catching flies and digesting them in special fuel cells that will break down sugar in the insects’ skeletons and release electrons that will drive an electric current.

“Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make “release and forget” robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry our remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations,” New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.

Chris Melhuish and his team, who are developing the robot, have to manually feed the flies to EcoBot II because they are still designing some type of pump to suck the insects into it.

“One of the great things about flies is that you can get them to come to you,” he said.

Hence the downside of the fully autonomous robot: it will have to use sewage or excrement to attract the flies and is bound to smell appalling.

Step 2 in the carnivorous robot doom plan. It’s only a matter of time before we start handing over old people and welfare mothers to ghoul-gizmos to fuel their giant mechanized masters.

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Living in Broward – Note to self, check it out, and see what walkabouts look interesting.

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No A/C at work yesterday until about 11:30 am. I was a walking river again, only I dried up. Preferred to take a shower for lunch. In the afternoon, it was sufficiently cool again.

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Got the first two city of Hero comics in the mail… they’re pretty cute. I wonder why they didn’t get sent before?

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Another Voodoo moment: Maroons

The word Maroon comes from the Spanish cimarron, a term that referred to escaped slaves who hid in the wilderness. These Maroons were common on every Caribbean island, as well as in Venezuela, Brazil and the Guyanas. Many Maroon communities were able to live independently for centuries in Haiti and Jamaica; there were semi-independent Maroon communities in Jamaica as late as the 1930s.Sometimes they formed alliances with Indian tribes; often, however, the two fought each other as well as their European enemies.

Despite the best efforts of colonial authorities, many Maroon communities thrived, often with the secret assistance of slaves within the plantation system, who organized support networks and passed on food, farming supplies and even weapons to their free comrades. In some places, the colonial governments were forced to make peace treaties with these powerful tribes.

The Maroon communities were often led by a priest-chieftain. Many African traditions and rituals were kept alive in these settlements. The Maroons, many of them former members of African secret societies, reinstituted their practices, and created some new ones, in order to avoid being infiltrated by colonial spies. A system of passwords, secret handshakes and even written passports was established among Maroon communities in the Caribbean. Escaped slaves who wished to join were subjected to complex, mystical initiation rites, designed to root out informers. In many cases, fear and superstition broke the will of spies, who confessed and were executed or cast out.

During the Haitian revolution, the Maroon settlements fought alongside the rebellious slaves, and they may have provided much of the leadership and fighting strength that won the war. The Maroons may have also originated many of the Voodoo rituals that survive to this day. Free from supervision by European slave masters, the Maroons were able to continue their mystic practices without interference. It is also believed that the Maroons formed the core of the secret societies that remain an influential force in Haiti to this day.

See also – Queen Mother Nanny

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Looking again at Disco Hitler… I wonder if a guy like that could ever come to power more easily, not that mass media is so prevalent, or would it be harder, because it’s so easy to change the channel?

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A very detailed Ivan Tracking page

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Funny thing… at least one of Danny’s students, (maybe more) reads this journal. It’s odd to hear about someone recounting details of my blog third-hand.

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Dang, I’m on call all weekend, again. Good news, the new tech looks like he’ll be a strong possibility for the week after. I’ll stay in the first week, just in case, but it should work out ok after that. MA has been taking a lot of call off lately, and ADP can’t work weekend, which leaves me in the lurch. Mildly peeved at hr, for not being home until about 7pm when she was due at 5.

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I haven’t been getting all of my lj replies back via email… I thought they ironed that bug out? I wonder what messages will be shaken loose once it’s repaired again?

ah, answer – “At approximately midnight PDT (07:00 GMT), the site will be unavailable while we upgrade an important machine. Our apologies for the short notice.

Due to the network problems of last night e-mails from our servers weren’t being sent out. Right now we’re sending out the messages that were in the backlog along with the regular e-mails, so it might take a while to receive your notifications.”

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Haven’t seen the bag lady since the hurricane. I wonder how she is, and if she migrated? I imagine the HIP folks were busy last week.

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Archives –

1 year ago – Run, Trism-Gollum, Run, robot zoo, dirty-sounding words, palm-day at work, lifetime membership in there, time marks the beginning of the end for prop2

2 years ago – oatmeal, remembrance rant, touch screen voting, flash CAD thingie.

3 years ago – hardscrabble, Daily Life in Chaucer’s England, (and other daily life books), good things

4 years ago – saw a black tip shark, conch fritters, everway