Thursday

The Psychology of Computer Programming (1971)

The Current

Archive

They're supposed to ship to me in April, I'll report back on if they immidiately die or this is the coolest thing I own. My biochemical engineering design project was using a similar chemical pathway to modify bacteria to glow in the presence of specific toxins so I absolutely need glowing petunias in my window box

"Especially designed for human-robot interaction topics, the humanoid Reddy is a development tool as well as an entertainment robot. By combining facial expression to arms movement, it easily express a wide range of emotions like joy, anger, sadness, surprise or disgust. Nine quiet servos control parts of the face, such as lips, eyes pitch and yaw and eyebrows though eight quiet and powerful digital servos control neck pitch and yaw, shoulders and elbows. Reddy can either run on a simple sequence script or be coupled to a more complex emotional system for very dynamic and realistic interaction. Optional hardware, such as microphones and cameras, can be added to the robot to perform localization and separation of sound sources as well as speech and objects detection and recognition. Sounds are played through a speaker installed on the chest. Moreover, the torso of Reddy is designed to be installed on many standard or non-standard mobile robot base for navigation." – The emotional humanoid.

   Creative Computing Magazine, November - December 1977

National Geographic Specials, The Hidden World of Insects, 1966

Love, Death & Robots - S1E11 - Helping Hand (2019)

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Source article: terremoto.net/2025/rst300

The musical content in this issue included a program to imitate the sound of a Japanese shakuhachi bamboo pipe, inspired by the soundtrack from The Karate Kid, and a review of the Roland TR-707 rhythm composer. The "hard disk primer" led off with the warning that they were "psychologically addictive" and included a later warning that they shouldn't be switched on multiple times in one day, given how much torque was needed to bring them up to operating speed. A news item mentioned Electronic Arts intended to purchase "rights to the brand" of the Atari software firm Batteries Included, which had been "plagued in its final days by piracy."

Heavy Metal, vol. 3, no. 2 (June 1979), with cover art by Angus McKie.

Angus McKie

Geometric Shapes / 260727