{"id":124,"date":"2008-04-04T19:26:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-05T03:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=124"},"modified":"2008-04-04T19:26:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-05T03:26:00","slug":"cybersnot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=124","title":{"rendered":"Cybersnot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Inspired by the synergy of my own stuffed, crusty, raw red nose and the long-awaited return of Battlestar Galactica (and if you haven&#8217;t seen the season premiere yet, what are you wasting time here for?  Get onto BitTorrent and start downloading <i>right fucking now<\/i>, do you hear me?), I am reminded of this little tech item sent courtesy of Alistair Blachford from UBC: <a href=\"http:\/\/itnews.com.au\/News\/50983,artificial-snot-not-to-be-sneezed-%20at.aspx\">the importance of mucous for the optimal functioning of robot noses<\/a>.  It seems that snot is essential to trap and distribute airborne molecules so they can be properly parsed by olfactory sensors.  And that in turn reminds me of <a href=\"http:\/\/rifters.com\/real\/articles\/Science_MobileRobots.pdf\">this earlier<\/a> article from <i>Science<\/i>, which reports that <i>sweat<\/i> might also be an integral part of robot makeup, since evaporative cooling can double the power output of robot servos.  The same paper reviews current research in the development of artificial muscles.   I wonder how many more wet and sticky and downright <i>organismal<\/i> traits are going to prove desirable and efficient for our robot overlords.  Is it possible that fleshy terminators and death-fetish replicants and even hot Cylon chicks look and taste and feel like us not merely for infiltration purposes, but because form follows function?  Do the best robots look like us?  Are we the best robots?<\/p>\n<p>Not in every way, I hope.  The best robots gotta have better arch support.  And it wouldn&#8217;t kill them to put their visual cabling <i>behind<\/i> the photoreceptors for a change.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and those wisdom teeth have got to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Inspired by the synergy of my own stuffed, crusty, raw red nose and the long-awaited return of Battlestar Galactica (and if you haven&#8217;t seen the season premiere yet, what are you wasting time here for? Get onto BitTorrent and start downloading right fucking now, do you hear me?), I am reminded of this little tech [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-airobotics","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}