I fear I have unceremoniously hijacked Trey's blog: I notice that the word "gadgets" has been replaced by "rants" in the header blurb. Don't give up Trey! Here's a peace offering - two of the latest in gadgetry:


360kph shinkansen. Check the emergency air-drag brakes that look like cat's ears. What's amazing about the Japanese bullet trains is that there have never been any serious accidents, despite such high speeds so close to the ground. Even the derailment in last year's Niigata earthquake failed to cause any significant injuries.


A rat trained to sniff out landmines in Mozambique.

Now that's some useful technology.

Sorry Trey, it looks like I messed up the Fork-n-life page layout by adding that oversized pic of Qrio. Some day, I'll have the technical prowess to avoid that kind of thing...

Did I mention that I'm kind of a soccer fan. In Houston, that means its time to learn Spanish because frankly all of the good matches tend to occur in points South of Matamoros. It doesn't get much better than the South American World Cup qualifiers because that's a bit of a World Cup unto itself. However, the best Confederation out there is the Confederation Africaine de Football (CAF). You never know what you're going to get, like, for example, this stork that attempted to take the field for Kenya against Morocco on Saturday:

Seriously, there's 52 teams in Africa and about 40 of them are better than Canada. That makes for some tremendous parity, especially when the powerhouses falter. Such is the case in the run-up to 2006, as the Nigerian Super-Eagles have occasionally played like sub-Eagles, enough to put them in serious danger of not making it to Deutschland next year. As for the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon, they're looking rather, uh, domitable. Should be an interesting finale this fall.

Well, it looks like the gloves are off. South Korea has a new humanoid robot:

No doubt, he'll challenge the Japanese likes of Qrio

and Nuvo

for anthroporobotic supremacy. I'll admit it is awfully cool that someone out there has the technical means to develop a robot that can walk, run, dance, and almost think like a human, or at least think like the socially awkward engineer who built it. The next words that come to mind, though, are "so what": balancing a biped is trickier than a quadruped or a hexaped but what is the functional utility of such a feat? Aren't we flattering ourselves a little too much by striving to create a machine in our image? I venture that, despite the eons of evolution that went into making the human species a rather helpless form that depended on mental prowess, the ideal architecture for a robot ought to be something quite different. I think the Martian Rovers have demonstrated, in addition to much technical success, the peril of relying on wheeled mobility instead of being able to walk. The value of walking, however, should not compell us to clone the human form of it.

I offset my social commentary with something frivolous and nerdy: Canadian seperatist, Gilles Duceppe...


looks like Jabba-the-Hutt crony Bib Fortuna...

Being a Canadian in Houston can be weird at times but sometimes the 8-month-long sauna that separates March from November can melt your sensors. I start thinking "hey, it's not that different from Canada" and then I read stories like this one. Your average Canada=Brrrrrr Houstonian's head is going to spin for hours if they read that story. Maybe not much unlike the way my head spun when I saw these yahoos on the news the other day. To be fair, based on my experiences here, I thought the KKK was no more than an accident of history; they may even be nothing more than a lunatic fringe at this point. But I mean, holy cow! Apart from acting all white and supreme, I have no idea what these people do and why they need to gather and do it collectively.

I know, I'm getting way off topic: I may need to start a new blog to explain why one of these things freaks me out and the other thing freaks me not in the slightest.

Still feeling remorseful about itemizing every problem of Japan, aside from the yakuza and the collapse of property prices (ongoing since 1989), because actually I love the country. Here's some nice pictures:

Kyoto


Tokyo


So many slippers, none in my size...