Unofficial Eqyptian Media. The Egyptian Sand Monkey is blogging up a storm about the revolt and riots there. There don't seem to be any Western journalists on the scene, and the police are trying to shut down the city and strikers, so Internet reports funneled out through blogs are the best information source.
Miyazaki On The Moon? Fans of a certain Japanese animated film might get a bit of déja vu from this NASA proposal for a mobile moon base for astronauts. Miyazaki always loved airships, but this is above and beyond.
Ad Vapor From Yahoo. Yahoo preannounces an ad management platform, that might help to enable the kind of site ad network that I blogged about before. The catch is that the rollout won't start until Q3, which won't have any impact on the current Microsoft takeover attempt. On the other hand, this could enable the type of destination site grand alliance that I mentioned in that post, combining the Microsoft and Yahoo properties and other big exposure ad venues, where the Google approach to ads hasn't worked so well.
Mistitled Robot Article. New Scientist has an interesting article titled "The Rise of Emotional Robots". The title, however, is pretty much backwards, as the content largely describes humans that get emotional about their bots, including milbots that get blown up in Iraq. For those who've followed the area of human computer interaction, finding humans projecting emotions - often unconsciously - onto machine displaying complex behaviors is not a surprise at all. More interesting is one cited study showing people when questioned about robot interactions don't believe the bots are 'thinking', perhaps due to their skepticism about current technical capabilities. Matching the likely human reaction to the task being accomplished by the robot is a very complex problem.