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Something to Watch: DVDs

It is a sad week when your choices for movies are between Zombie A-Hole and Attack of the Killer Backpacks.

In TV we have Planet Dinosaur, speculative science rather than Sci-Fi, and quite worth your time to check out. You might enjoy taking a look at this page as well if you are looking for a bit more.

Anime has a few new goodies this week starting with Shangri-La, one of my favorite shows from last year. It deals with a future Japan in the middle of a climatic crises and under economic attack, with a ruling elite holding onto the ultimate gated community while the poor starve and live on the street. Until Kuniko take up the gauntlet and fights for the survival of her people, storming the heavily armed gates of heaven’s suburb itself to see them through.

Shakugan no Shana is a story of a warrior who battles demons with a flaming sword, and the dead human boy who has been turned into one of those flames. They work together to defeat evil and maintain the balance between the supernatural world and the mundane.

Finally, No. 6: The Complete Collection takes place in a near future world where a handful of survivors cling desperately to life. There is a mystery to be solved if our two protagonists are to have any hope of survival, and they have to do it before the corrupt elite wipe them out.

Copper Starts Tomorrow

The new show from BBC America is Copper, about a cop in 1864 New York City. As far as I know this is something new for them, producing their own original TV series, but they have some good ones in the pipe. I am particularly looking forward to seeing David Tennent as a spy, the closest he might get to playing Bond.

More ROS Fun

Here is a slightly different project created with the Robot Operating System at the core of its programming. While I think he might have wanted to spend a bit more time training his Voice Recognition interface before making this video, he did do a wonderful job with this project. If you are curious about how exactly this works, he has lots more videos on his You Tube Channel, plus he has uploaded his source code and hardware interfacing instructions to Sourceforge. I am sure it will be no surprise to anyone that this is a project involving AstroMech, the R2 Builders Club.

Robonaut 2, the ISS, and You

Robonaut 2 had some nice glowing reports of earning its keep in orbit on the ISS back in March… This project was an unusual collaboration, 15 years in the making, between NASA and General Motors, each of whom had their own reasons for wanting to develop a much more advanced robot than anything then available. There was another requirement in the development criteria; it had to be a robot that could do things like a human would do them, using a similar visual feedback and manipulatory structure. In plain English, two eyes looking forward from its head, and hands with opposable thumbs on person length arms, so it could use the same tools, vehicles, and other components of a human environment to do jobs that assisted people or freed them up for other tasks.

They did such a good job on it that the team and project are now up for the Sammies Award this year, and you can read a great interview here with one of the original developers about their approach to the entire endeavor.

What has happened since? Well, not as many news stories it seems, but some very exciting stuff if you were thinking about cobbling together your own variant. They have now released the Robonaut 2 Simulator as a free download over at ROS.org (Robot Operating System). The tested versions are only certified to run on Ubuntu 12.04 since that was the box they tested them on (what a surprise, the very version I upgraded my own Ubuntu box to just a few days ago), but the dependencies are pretty generic, so it should run on most scientifically oriented recent Linux builds. If you need to compile something for a more specific system, you can grab the source code here, tweak it for your own hardware, and make any other changes your system might require.

All of which means you can write your own instruction sets for the robot and see exactly what happens when it carries them out! There is a very good chance this is going to become one of the core R.O.S.’s going forward, not least because it is open source, so if you are considering a future in robotics I strongly recommend downloading this as a way to explore and learn the possibilities.

Star Trek in the Park

The target location being Woodlawn Park in Portland, Oregon. The team from Atomic Arts are doing live presentations of Journey to Babel as presented on screen by TOS (The Original Series, as if you didn’t already know). I will now be going through all the Con Event postings in my part of the country to see if I can find them performing at a venue a little close than the other side of the continent, since I would love to see this on stage.

The story itself was written by D.C. Fontana, and first published in the March 1953 edition of the pulp magazine Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder. J/K, because that’s the magazine from the DS9 episode Far Beyond the Stars in which the entire cast got to be humans putting out a science fiction magazine, one of my personal favorites from that series. But they posted it that way in Memory Alpha, and after I got done laughing I just had to pass the joke along.