For a Friday funny video we feature a 70s USA advertisement for Bionic Woman dolls and the Bionic Beauty Salon. Enjoy your Bionic woman and the knob-controlled “Beauty” parameter.

The company Vollee is creating a client that offers cellphone users full access to Second Life. The company is accepting registrations for their beta rollout that begins in May. In short (and they provide all in short): All heavy lifting (graphics rendering etc.) is done on their servers and then streamed to the user’s phone. They’ve published a video which is embedded below.

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Briefly rehashing what I said in my introductory post to Twine; this online service allows you to gather your data into one place (videos, bookmarks, photos, etc.). From around the web or from your own machine. And with more intelligence and metadata extraction/understanding which makes it easier to organize and find your information. Or discover information of interest to you as there’s a lively bunch of people (and AI) on there already recommending information.

So I’m pleased to announce that I have invitation tickets for interested readers & supporters of Think Artificial. Getting a nice productivity tool ahead of about 40,000 people waiting to get access.

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For the past few months I’ve been an active member of Twine.com; a beta semantic web app riddled with AI to help us organize, share and discover information. The beta is still under heavy construction, but at this point in time, I’ve migrated entirely from Del.icio.us, personal wikis and similar online services and over to Twine.

There are several reasons for this, some of which I’ll detail here — and end by hinting at why it’s immediately relevant despite Twine being in an invitation-only beta.

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Have you ever wanted to control your computer with your mind? I have. And come next December maybe we will. It’s been almost a year since I first talked about Emotiv Systems and the company’s EPOC headset. They’ve stayed somewhat secretive since then (crypticness and stealth that also extended to my email correspondence with them). But last February 19th they came out of the cave at the GDC’08 conference with a brand new bone, the latest version of their consumer based brain-computer interface that is quite frankly geeking me out. The headset will be marketed for the game industry and is expected to go for $299. Read on for what to expect. The features are, well, pretty unbelievable.

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Just a quick notice to those who only read the feeds and not the comments. Last entry was posted on April 1st. And to those who read it and believed it, I hope you forgive me and that you’re comforted by laughter in this last tiny part of the joke — the text hidden in the HTML code, right beneath my signature:

[[ SYSTEM-MESSAGE-BEGINS.
This post was automatically generated by TOWTAW v1.3.
Administrator privileges have been subsumed and user ‘Hrafn’ purged.
SYSTEM-MESSAGE-ENDS. ]]

Since early December 2007, a new author has been publishing articles on Think Artificial under my name. This author is not human, but intelligent software created by myself to relieve the pressure of regular posting. Currently, the system has posted over 20 articles without breaking cover.

Taking its cues from Google News Alerts on “robotics”, the system analyzes news articles — identifying and extracting relevant lines of text and generating a shorter version of the article. The text is then paraphrased using preset tunings to mimic my writing style. The ultimate result is an article that only needs my one-click administrator approval to be published.

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I recently came across news of a device that geeked me out. Its a neckband that can detect and analyze neural firings when we think about saying something, and translate them into audible words via speech synthesizer. Beyond the obvious use of bettering the lives of people who’ve lost their ability to speak, it could enable us to make phonecalls without having to actually talk (as is demonstrated in a video in this article). The creators of the device mention that they’ll have a product by the end of the year for people with ALS (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s Disease).

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Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was born on the 16th of December 1917 in Minehead, England. Perhaps best known for his contributions to science fiction, and his inventions, his achievements will certainly not be forgotten anytime soon.

Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a radar instructor from 1941-1946. It was there where he invented & proposed the idea of communications satellites in 1945 — an idea that materialized quickly and we now know, use and depend on to sustain our societies. His proposal won him the Franklin Institute Gold Medal and in 1994 he was nominated for a Nobel Prize. Consequently he became the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society.

He collaborated with Stanley Kubrick to create, in my and many others’ opinion, one of the greatest films of all time — and concurrently developed what later became a novel of the same name: 2001: A Space Odyssey shook the world and continues to inspire and provoke thought.

Moved to Sri Lanka in 1956. Knighted in 1998.

A Hero Passed Away on March 19th, 2008.
Arthur Charles Clarke will be missed.

Boston Dynamics released a new video of BigDog the other day. The improvements since last year’s demo are absolutely incredible. BigDog can now maneuver up and down rugged hills, balance on ice and jump. I’m not an avid fan of exclamation marks, but wow! In my honest opinion this quadruped is the most life-like robot made to date. Must-see video after the jump.

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