Dennis Can't Do This

Hopper, that is

Military robot ‘hops’ over walls

Most of the time, the shoebox-sized robot – which is being developed for the US military – uses its four wheels to get around.
But the Precision Urban Hopper can use a piston-actuated “leg” to launch it over obstacles such as walls or fences.

The ad in the video is longer than the video, but it’s worth the 30 seconds. The slow-motion replay really needs the bionic sound effect from The Six Million Dollar Man to complete the experience.

A Member of the TMTOTH Club

*Too Much Time On Their Hands

Leave It to Beaver: 1958

Someone watched an episode from “Leave It to Beaver” and freeze-framed a note from the principal that got sent home with ‘the Beav.’


Lew Burdette just hit a home run and Milwaukee leads seven to one in the series.

This is the last line of the filler material of the note.
No, my mistake, that was only the next to last. This is last.

Ptole … Doh!

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Reconstruction of a planet’s bizarre orbit with Ptolemy’s system of epicycles and deferents.

What’s behind this? Any periodic function can be represented as a Fourier series. All that’s really happening here is one is plotting it in polar coordinates, and the Fourier components become epicycles. Any one-line drawing made without the pen leaving the paper and starting where it stops, should be able to be represented this way.

Is it Illegitimate Journalism?

The Daily Show as Legitimate Journalism

Jon Stewart makes no pretense that he’s all about the entertainment, but I think the article is right — he does ask the tough questions when the time comes and shows good insight into issues.

The venerable Sunday morning news shows, oftentimes featuring some of the most reputable people in journalism, largely go through a formulaic process, repeated weekly with their guests. The crack team of researchers will provide a number of quotes made by said interviewee appearing to contradict each other that the guest will then evade and stonewall against by jumping through any number of grammatical, contextual, semantic, and logical hoops. While The Daily Show has a more varied roster of guests from week to week, the Sunday morning talk shows routinely have decision makers and opinion leaders on to explain themselves. Put it this way; who would you rather have interview David Addington, Alberto Gonzalez, Donald Rumsfeld, or Dick Cheney? I would feel much more confident that an interview with Stewart would reveal more of a subject than an interview with any of the Sunday morning hosts. If British talk show host David Frost can cement the legacy of a disgraced U.S. president, then certainly Jon Stewart would be able to shed light on some of our more pressing national issues.

I’m guessing that some of the people mentioned would rather only be interviewed by someone who was tossing slow pitches over the fat part of the plate

I Can No' Change the Laws of Physics, Cap'n!

Quantum setback for warp drives

Bad news I’m afraid — it looks as if faster-than-light travel isn’t possible after all. That’s the conclusion of a new study into how warp drives would behave when quantum mechanics is taken into account. “Warp drives would become rapidly unstable once superluminal speeds are reached,” say Stefano Finazzi at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and a couple of friends.