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Video Subscribe to Video Blog  Note: This is a separate subscription from that of our standard web log and podcast. This subscription will automatically download videos in the same way podcasts are downloaded. As these are in Windows Media files they may not play on all devices.  Friday, October 07, 2005
AUDIO:
MP3 The 2nd DARPA Grand Challenge takes place this weekend. It is a virtual Star Wars junkyard of unpeopled robots rolling across the desert in pursuit of a 2 million dollar hare. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known for developing The Internet and training dolphins to carry bombs, sponsors the event. But no spook stuff here, the public is welcome, IF you want to get yourself to Primm, Nevada (a nowhere with no there there) real real early Saturday morning (Oct 8). We were at the Grand Challenge last year, in another godforsaken spot near Barstow, California, cheering on a doomed dunebuggy that bit the sand in the trials. This time twenty contestants will try to complete s 175 mile course to win $2-million bucks, double last years prize. Take a look at the video we shot last year, which included one of this year's finalists: the mighty TerraMax, a 37,000 pound six wheeled vector of shock and awe that won't stop for anything. Read about last year. Also, happy 90th birthday to Les Paul, with a new CD and still strummng strong at the Iridium in New York City every Monday evening. He invented the multi-track tape recorder, an instrument Orson Welles called "The Octopus." The 15th annual Ignoble Prizes have been handed out, honoring scientific genius that, in the words of its founder "cannot and should not be reproduced." Their web page is just as cheezy as the winners, among them: Neuticles, artificial replacement testicles for dogs (DARPA would probably mine them with plastics explosives) and a carpet-covered alarm clock that runs away and hides before it can be switched off. I love word books. I wish Bill Bryson would abandon his grumpy, partially-manufactured travel stories and get back to writing the word books he gained his first fame from. There is a new one by the UK's Adam Jacot de Boinod that I can't wait to get my hands on. It is called The Meaning of Tingo, one of those collections of bon and not-so-bon mots that is guaranteed to make you the life of the party. Tingo is a word in Pascuense, the language of Easter Island, that means borrowing objects from a friend's house, one by one, until there is nothing left. The author's background is as a researcher for a BBC radio quiz. Figures. Areodjarekput an Inuit word, stands for the practice of exchanging wives for a few days to help pass the time in the long winter nights. In Russian, koshatnik is a dealer of stolen cats and to a Japanese man bakku-shan is a woman who looks attractive from the rear but not from the front.1:33:22 PM 
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