February 2010 – The Science Fiction Review

Kevin Warwick wants to be a CyborgKevin Warwick wants to be a Cyborg

February 12, 2010| Stettin| 0 Comment| 6:05 pm

Remember at the end of The Empire Strikes Back where Luke gets his hand chopped off by Vader? During one of the closing scenes, a robot doctor finishes up installing a replacement hand for Luke.

Luke Skywalker's Cyborg Hand

Kevin Warwick did something similar as an experiment, but without the whole getting his hand chopped off step. Instead he put an electrode in his hand that could transmit commands to a robotic hand through radio waves. This was done back in 2002, and somehow I never heard of it. I’m sure Ray Kurzweil would be proud. Check out the video below for more information about how he did this, and some other advances like using rat brain cells to power robots. If you are at all interested in robotics, cyborgs, or AI, you’ll be in for a treat.

Artificial intelligence: Ex-cyborg Kevin Warwick on mixing man and machine
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silicon.com

Belly-dancing Slave LeiaBelly-dancing Slave Leia

February 3, 2010| Stettin| 0 Comment| 5:49 pm

OK, so a long time ago I was excited to see the Slave Leia girls on Deal or No Deal. Watching it with my wife was somewhat awkward, but she was kind enough to humor me. One of my good friends over at What the Photo sent me an interesting stumble today featuring, get this, a belly-dancing slave Princess Leia! It looks like Amira Sa’id has been doing this for some time now. How I’ve not come across this until now is a complete mystery. For more information, including some interviews and other pictures and videos, visit Amira’s website at http://www.amiradance.com/LeiaLive.html
Check it out!

via Nerd Salad

Borderlands by 2K GamesBorderlands by 2K Games

February 1, 2010| Stettin| 0 Comment| 7:28 pm

Borderlands by 2K Games is a unique mashup of and FPS and RPG. The game is rated M for a reason, there is nonstop killing and gore. If you liked Diablo 2, and enjoy FPS games, you’d love Borderlands. They both have three playthroughs with the same missions, but higher difficulty. Also, the loot engine has random loot with 17,750,000 different possibilities. Part of the fun is the unending quest for better loot. Overall, the variety of missions is much more in-depth in Borderlands. You can play single player or multi, but with Borderlands your single player character is compatible with multiplayer games.

Last week I finally finished the first playthrough with a couple of friends that have mastered the game already. They were kind enough to start out with level 1 along with me and work through the story missions. One of my friends has beaten the game five times and still enjoys it. I think that is a testament to the quality of the game. Most of the missions are NOT just kill XX and come back, much like I remembered World of Warcraft to be. There are a few early missions like that, but overall most of them are much more complex. (more…)