Quite possibly the holy grail of robotics is the anthroform robot, a robot which is bipedal in configuration, just like a human or other great ape. As it turns out, it's very tricky to build such a robot without it being too heavy or having power requirements that are unreasonable in the extreme (which only exacerbates the former problem). The first real success in this field was Honda's ASIMO in the year 2000.ev, which most recently uses a lithium-ion power cell that permits one hour of continuous runtime for the robot. ASIMO is also, if you've ever seen a …

Lyssa and I packed up our stuff and set out around 1100 EST5EDT on Saturday morning in the general direction of Rockville to Laurelinde’s place, where we picked up Cate and Tori (after a cup of coffee, of course, following a rather rude surprise early that day) for an afternoon in Maryland. We set off toward College Park for lunch at Plato’s Diner because it happened to be within spitting distance of our eventual destination. Tori was turning sixteen and as her gift we’d all chipped in to get her ears re-pierced at Curious Tattoo on the …