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[YouTube, The Bird and the Bee—Thanks Kalle]

* It's FOTC day.

Jesús Díaz: Have you tried to give your astromech droid actual "droid" powers? You know, like some complex sensory input and artificial intelligence, at least at the AIBO level.
Chris James: One of the top questions we get is, are they autonomous or can they be retrofitted with the electronics from the little interactive R2 from Hasbro. The simple answer is yes they can be or could be done, but (and it's a big but) would you want a 200lb aluminum droid running around bumping into things? At a convention or show full of kids it would be incredibly dangerous.

Even something small like the holo projector eye twitching could poke an eye out as kids look into them all the time. I've been at events where we've had frequency issues and it's incredible scary when a droid starts tearing off when you're not expecting it.

Having said that, there are a number of people working on AI R2's, mostly powered by Leaf.

JD: Are you planning to add them yourself in the future, though?
CJ: My droid is powered by a bunch of small PIC micro processors, so not a huge amount of processing power but I may add some sensor/intelligence, like rotation dome/tracking, and syncing sound to people talking to him. But I'd make it optional and under my control when I want it to be autonomous. So if people were at a distance he could track movement and respond with sounds.

JD: Seeing your R2-D2—and looking at current toy robotics—actually makes me believe that there's a possibility of having a Maybe not capable of calculating hyperspace jumps, but good enough to order him things using speech, rather than a remote. Do you think we will see multifunction droids in the spirit of R2 coming from companies any time soon?
CJ: I'm really not a robotics expert by any stretch of the imagination, but from what I see we're there right now in some area, but I can't see people owning cheap AI droids like C3PO or Artoo in our lifetime. It would be nice, but I just can't see Asimo gaining enough intelligence at a price we can all afford.

I would be quite happy to have this one combined with an HD projector, all speech controlled. [Artoo Detoo—Video by Brian Lam]

• Can he make his own gadgets without having to go run for help to daddy's company?
• Can he let girls do their make-up while they look at his shiny armor? (of course not, Mr Wayne has a fake rubber suit with fake nipples)
• Can he make perfect Margaritas, Martinis and Manhattans on his own, without needing Alfred?
• Can he fly? (No, not fall, I mean fly)
• Can he actually have a bit of fun or is this all about looking miserable, fighting with your demons in three-word sentences with almost no verbs? (Of course he can't. It's "Back in the hole. The beast. The beast comes to me. Old. Old and dark. I feel his breath. Evil. Evil and dark. Evil and dark and eternal. Like them. Like me" all the damn time. Damnit Bruce, get a vacation in a tropical island with a hot buxom blonde and a fully-stocked bar.)

Because if Batman actually enjoyed life in-between saving the World city, he would be the greatest international playboy gadget hero ever. You know, like Tony Stark. And kick his own ass any day.

What do you think? Batman or Iron Man?

Or better yet: who would you like to be? A tortured soul who lives a miserable life having flashbacks about pearls falling on a dirty street, lives with another man, and fights crime in rubber pants and a cape, or a brilliant inventor who builds his own gadgets, dates—for real, not as a façade, you know, with actual sex—the hottest girls on the planet, and can fly in a hot rod red and gold armor? Hello?

The Launch Complex 40—and 41—was the base for the largest US expendable rocket, the Titan IV. It started operations in 1965 with Titan IIIC rockets, and it was home for the legendary Mars Viking (1975) and Voyager missions, which has been crossing our solar system since 1977. The site was also the launch pad for the failed Mars Observer mission, as well as the successful Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, which departed Earth on October 15, 1997.

The last launch was for a Lacrosse-5 reconnaissance satellite, launched on April 30, 2005 on board a Titan IVB rocket.

Now seriously, can't engineers stop doing their...engineering or whatever they do at their secret underwater lairs, and watch some sci-fi movies or TV series or at least Pigs In Space? What are they going to do when Monty's wife starts taking out the inhibitors from all the Roombas at the White House and they steal the launch codes? One word, people: Cylons. Or worse: Bender. [Anybots via BotJunkie]

Getting children to the operating room is extremely scary for them (and us too), so they usually have to be sedated to calm them down. Dr. Low observed that by watching some videos on the iPhone, his kids got completely disconnected from the outside world. He thought that this effect could help children in the hospital get distracted—especially when they leave the room where they wait with their parents—so he gave it a try.

It worked. And for six months, he has used this method with 450 children, reducing the use of sedatives by 85%. The benefit not only makes the children a little bit less nervous: without sedatives, kids wake up smoother and are less drowsy after the operation, so they can get back home more quickly.

Of course, this can be done with any video playing device, but Dr. Low seems to believe that the iPhone is perfect for the job, arguing that it doesn't interfere with the equipment and can be easily sanitized. We are sure that the same can be said about other personal media players, but whatever helps kids is fine with us. [King5]

Apparently, the news ticker also pointed out that the new iPhone will have a 37-foot screen, but an official channel representative has confirmed to us that this was just a typo: "I think the guys from the news ticker really meant 3.7 inches," the TV station's night janitor said on a phone interview.

In relation to these breaking news, Jason Chen—Gizmodo's senior associate editor—pointed out that he didn't want to be disturbed while he was playing GTA IV. "Frack off!" he declared. [The Onion]

Composed of 15 modules arranged in groups of five, each of CKbot's clusters has a module with a 20fps camera, a blinking LED, and an accelerometer to reconstruct the entire robot, using magnets. The other 12 modules have an embedded computer, proximity sensors, and a servo motor that allows a rotational range of about 180 degrees.

When the main mini-Voltron-wannabe gets destroyed and the clusters are disconnected, they self-right up themselves detecting its orientation according to gravity (don't keep looking like an idiot and start running now). Once they are on position, the cameras search for the unique LED patterns, and then two closers start to approach each other at glacial speeds (by this time, you should have reached the weapons storage and grab a shotgun, five machine guns, and a grenade launcher). When the two first modules connect, they start searching for the third one (you may fire now) until they finally assemble again, forming a single entity that would inevitably destroy you if we hadn't told you the steps above.

Yes, somewhere in the future, this advice will save your life. Print it out. [New Scientist Tech]

[Video and images courtesy of Bob Parrish]

No wonder she made our top 10 list of hot bloggers in 2006. [Clicknetwork via Fashion Funky—thanks Yash]

"This year we have 125 partipants," show organizer Frank Tiano told us, "with 40 hobby vendors and coverage from 35 magazined from all over the world." In a good weather day, Top Gun gets 10,000 drooling spectators.

Looking at the detail and size of these beasts, we can understand exactly why.

Frank also confirmed to us that the A-10 featured in Popsci.com was going to participate in the competition, as well as many other new entries. So if you are around, it's a complete must, Maverick's glasses not required (but recommended.) [Top Gun—photos by Palmer Johnson, DVD video available from Wildberry Productions]

NOTE: if you're planning on assisting the Top Gun 2008 event, contact us at tips@gizmodo.com if you want to collaborate with us.

The first flight took him from the Brazilian town of Ampére to San Antonio, in Argentina, complete with tin foil pants and a DIY seat. He landed without any incident, getting rid of the balloons to lose altitude until he reached the ground.

The second flight isn't finished yet. Or at least, not officially. This time he had with him a GPS unit, which he planned to use to relay his coordinates to the ground.

There was only one problem: he didn't know how to use it correctly. Padre Adelir de Carli took off after a special mass last Sunday, at 1PM. The weather was bad, but he didn't care. He wanted to fly again, this time to beat the record of flight distance with party balloons. And besides, he was sure his new GPS was going to provide him with some safety, a way to ask for help with his precise location in the case anything went wrong.

The plan didn't work out. The strong winds took him 31 miles into the sea, and a little bit later, frustrated, he requested help from people on the ground:

I need to contact someone who can teach me how to operate this GPS, so I can give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way that people on the ground can know where I am.

Sadly, nobody was able to explain to him how to do it correctly and, around 9PM—the time of his last contact—he disappeared. After a two-day search using military police helicopters, and the cooperation of local fishing boats, it seems Father de Carli's flying dreams are not going to have a happy ending. The last thing that people found were fragments of balloons, next to the beaches of Santa Catarina.

I'm sure some people will call him an idiot for not learning how to use the GPS first, but what is more interesting in this story is asking how technology could still be so difficult to use. Is it really necessary to read an instruction manual or get directions to operate a gadget? The answer is simple: It doesn't have to be.

I'm supposed to be a "technology expert," dealing all day long with gadgets, but I still find plenty of devices that are a complete user interface nightmare. Things that require instruction manuals when there are no excuses anymore to design clear, straightforward interfaces that can be accessed by people with zero experience in technology.

I see this sad event, which has ended in the tragedy of a missing person—obviously he's a bit crazy and this is all his fault—as an example of all that is wrong with the design of machines today. Not because technology itself was the cause of him getting lost—it wasn't. It was more bad luck and bad planning than anything else. After all, his first flight was a success without GPS, and men have been wandering through Earth without any help for thousands of years.

The problem here is that I can imagine his frustration, trying to make sense of an infernal device so he could tell people his exact location, all the while knowing that he was going to get lost forever in the immensity of the sea.

And while we don't put ourselves in these crazy life or death situations every day, it wouldn't be bad if manufacturers actually invested some money and intelligence in making technology truly accessible. Not just a bunch of circuits and software tied together with extremely badly-designed UIs that merely alienate the user, but devices that can actually help people and make their experiences enjoyable.

Until then, I'm afraid we will have to live with thousands of useless gadgets that not men, and neither God will ever truly understand. [G1 and G1]

Watching him explain it, the genius of Dr. Bevilaqua's F-35B Shaft Driven Lift Fan is obvious. After all, the invention is quite simple. According to Bevilaqua, the best way to create power from the engine is by using a turbine. That power then gets moved forward using a shaft that connects to a fan, providing the vertical lift on the front of the plane—and all while the turbine exhaust is redirected to the ground to lift the back of the plane.

The result is a supersonic plane with great maneuverability. Like a car, Bevilaqua explains, the pilot starts the engine, engages the clutch that activates the lift fan, increases power—and off it goes. To make things even better, the bleed air coming off from the top runs over the winds so the F-35B handles smoothly while going vertically, "like if it was mounted on a hydraulic lift."

The idea, he says, came at the very end of a nine-month study to see if it was possible to do a supersonic successor to the Harrier for the Marine Corp. "I had to come up with a way to increase the thrust of a jet engine so that you could take off vertically, but yet not make it impossible for the airplane to go supersonic."

Dr. Bevilaqua—who started working with Hans von Ohain, the German engineer who invented the jet engine with the Heinkel He 178, and encouraged him to think not about math but about engineering—sketched his first idea on a napkin, which was a turbine with a drive shaft sticking out the front of the engine. He got it to a propulsion expert at Skunk Works to see if it was feasible or not. From there it was transformed from paper dream to reality: Lockheed Martin applied for the patent in 1990, which ended up being one of the factors that landed them the massive $200 billion contract for the Joint Strike Fighter against Boeing's X-32.

[Govexec, Global Security, Skunk Works and Wikipedia via The DEW Line]

It seems like the perfect software for the laziest people in the world, but it's one of those "oh wow" things that will make everyone smile when using it.

Breakthrough Visual Search Engine for Mobile Phones Takes Off Big in Japan

Pasadena, CA & Tokyo, Japan - April 17, 2008 - Evolution Robotics Inc., a leading robotics technology company, in partnership with Bandai Networks Co. Ltd, Japan's leading mobile content provider, announced today that KDDI Corporation is including the "ER Search" visual search engine on its new Spring 2008 "au™" line of camera phones, and has made it available for download for any KDDI customer with a prior "au" camera phone. This launch marks a dramatic expansion in the market for mobile visual search, which will enable millions of consumers in Japan alone to do online searches by taking pictures of everyday objects with their camera phone.

The deployment of this technology in the mass market also opens up an entirely new range of categories of services for mobile marketing, which is already projected to grow to $24 Billion worldwide by 2013. (Source: ABI Research)

ER Search is a mobile search engine operated by Bandai Networks and powered by Evolution Robotics' ViPR visual pattern recognition system. It works essentially like using a traditional search engine, but without having to type any text or go through complicated menus. Instead, users simply snap a picture of something they're interested in and immediately get back relevant content, all in the palm of the hands.

As an example, KDDI customers will be able to take a picture of a music CD that would return links relating to the artist, hear clips from the album and purchase songs to download on their phone. If they are shopping for wine in a store, they can take a picture of the wine label and get expert reviews and recommendations on the spot. Or, if they are browsing through a catalog and see an item they'd like to buy, they can order it immediately by snapping a picture of the item on the page.

"ER Search is an entirely new way for connecting consumers with content and companies," said Satoshi Oshita, CEO of Bandai Networks. "Because ER Search runs on mobile phones, searches happen when and where the customer is, as soon as they see something that they're interested in. Additionally, the fact that a customer simply has to click a picture of a product or advertisement, makes the search process far easier and immediate than anything that has been available before."

"We are very pleased to be working with Bandai Networks and are excited to see the momentum building in the Japanese market," said Paolo Pirjanian, President and CEO of Evolution Robotics. "Our mission is to take aerospace-grade technologies and make them affordable for mass market applications, and ER Search is a great example. We see this as just the start of a growing market for visual search in Asia and other parts of the globe and are actively working with our partners to expand the range of services that can benefit consumers and companies alike."

Bandai Networks had already deployed ER Search on over one million phones in Japan in 2007. With this deployment with KDDI, the number of users with access to ER Search will expand by millions more in a very short time, making it even more compelling for companies and advertisers to participate in the service.

About ViPR

The ViPR technology easily supports user-generated content so that users can take new pictures of objects, images, videos or even locations and tag them with links and content to expand the database. That content will then show up in the results returned to other users who take similar pictures, thus creating a robust world-wide visual database for communities to develop and access. (A video demonstration of Evolution Robotics' visual search technology running on Apple's iPhone can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/user/EvolutionRobotics)

ER Search's versatility rests in Evolution Robotics' breakthrough ViPR visual recognition technology. ViPR is able to learn new objects and images on the fly (such as the cover art on a music CD), without the need for any special encoding such as barcodes or watermarks. Just as significant, ViPR performs well on low cost components such as the cameras used on most mobile phones today, even when lighting and other visual conditions are poor.

For the music search application alone, Bandai Networks has over 150,000 music CD covers already indexed in their database. Other mobile marketing and mobile commerce applications include providing content and links for print ads, book covers, DVDs, product packaging, movie posters, retail displays, business signs, etc. Even animation, streaming video or images from live TV can be supported.

[Evolution via Mobile Whack]

You can download HWPen today using Installer.app. Go to "Sources," click on "Edit" and "Add" a new source:

http://iphonecake.com/src/new

Then refresh your sources and look for HWPen in the iPhoneCake packages category. Install the software and restart the iPhone.

You will have to restart your iPhone.

The software is still in beta and it has quite a few errors—it doesn't work correctly in landscape mode and it doesn't appear in Mail.app for now—but it works a bit better than Doonesbury's original Newton (I just started using it, though), although not as good as later incarnations of the Newton or Graffiti, as you can see in the video. But it's a start and hopefully it will get into a solid alternative for the people who hate the on-screen keyboard (I prefer the keyboard myself, it's just a lot faster than I would ever be doing character recognition). [Hanwang via ModMyiFone]

[Pink Tentacle]

In other words, despite the wait, if there's going to be cocktails we'll be there like shareware. [Aeros via Gizmag]

According to the always entertaining Richard Quest, the delays have been caused precisely by the new technologies and manufacturing strategies that Boeing is using for the 787. Mainly, the biggest problem seems to be with the carbon fiber modules being manufactured all through the world, which then have to be brought and put together at Boeing's Everett factory in Washington, using their gigantic cargo Dreamlifter.

But as Quest points out, there will have to be major changes to this process because, at the end of the day, "the reality is that they have discovered they can't do it" in this way. One of these immediate and most serious changes, will likely require a redesign of the 787's wingbox.

As a result of these troubles, Boeing has ended with "new revised schedules" and an "extraordinary embarrassment" comparable to the humiliation that EADS had as a result of the multiple delays on the Airbus A380.

The even-worse thing is that, while it's understandable that companies like Boeing and EADS may have setbacks in the construction of these giant next-generation machines, the problem doesn't end in the technological embarrassment: Boeing will have to pay compensation to the airlines who have already bought 850 Dreamliners—which is "far more than any other aircraft at this stage"—and were expecting them on time.

Nightmareliner indeed. [CNN]

I want the Pixar one, badly, but I wouldn't say no to his home-made zoetrope here. Much humble, but equally charming.

You can get all the details of the construction in his site. [LEGO 3D Zoetrope and VNOG via MAKE]

As we already knew, everything in this restaurant in Nuremberg is completely automated, from the ordering process—using a touchscreen which also allows you to surf the web or email while waiting for our order—to the delivery of the food to your color-coded seat. Only the cooking is manual, which is done by some Elzar apprentices, 70% human-30% iron chefs, somewhere in the building.

The creator of the technology behind 's Baggers thinks there's a big market for these kinds of restaurant, which are convenient, fun, and save costs to the owners and the clients. The BBC seems to agree. Their verdict: fun, delicious, fast, and no tips. Makes a good case to eradicate that awful, ingrate job of waitressing all throughout the planet. Sad, I know. But don't despair, my friends: there's always blogging.

Go to the BBC page to get their full impressions. ['s Baggers via BBC News]

And I can't be more grateful for that decision. I don't know about you, but the idea of having these strange (anti)heroes walking around a "real" 1985's New York, Ozymandias's massive Karnak, Mason's garage, Dr. Manhattan's nuclear lab, the Comedian's tacky bachelor's pad, and Rorschach's jail—all full of the retro gadgets, technology and the dirt of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comicbook masterpiece— has me excited.

If the movie is as good as his take on Frank Miller's 300, Snyder's Watchmen is going to be one for the books. [Watchmen via Superherohype]

[The Ledger—thanks tinshaker]

He's got pants, some black pants,
and the looks of baby Spock.
When the going gets tough, he's really rough,
with a Hong Kong Phooey chop (Hi-Ya!)

Kung Fu Kidz, he's really not very tall.
Kung Fu Kidz, bald like a billiard ball.
Kung Fu Kidz, he's fan-riffic (gong!)

(watch him in action, to the tune of Hong Kong Phooey, after the jump)

This future classic of the intarwebs, hours of fun and millions of possibilities, awaits in some hidden warehouse for your $6.99 order. Hi-Ya! [Product Page via NerdApproved]

Thankfully, the police understood there was no real danger in this vehicle, unless you consider plastering someone in red paint an act of war.

Complete with tank treads and 3-cylinder diesel engine, this is a paintball version of the Panzerkampfwagen VI—which is the actual technical denomination, it was nicknamed Tiger by Ferdinand Porsche, who competed for the Nazi government contract before doing cars for James Dean. This Tiger has a scuba-tank-powered cannon instead of terrifying 8.8 cm KwK 36 L/56 cannon that could take out Shermans and Churchills IVs from up to a mile away (1,600 meters.)

The armor in this half-sized version, however, it much lighter than the original model, which was able to withstand a direct impact of the 76.2 mm gun of the mighty Soviet T-34 tank, at any range. The mini-Tiger would probably not be able to stand the impact of a beer can. Still, we would love to give it a spin. [Jalopnik]

Boeing Dreamlifter Spec sheet

• Range: Dependent on payload but comparable to other members of the 747 family of aircraft.
• Wing Span: 211.5 feet (64.44 meters)
• Length: 235 feet, 2 inches (71.68 meters)
• Height (fin tip): 70 feet, 8 inches (21.54 meters)
• Swing Tail Cargo Door:Hinge on aft section of the fuselage
• Cruise Speed:Mach 0.82
• Cargo Capacity:65,000 cubic feet
• Maximum Takeoff Weight:803,000 lbs

[Boeing]

Update: Due to legalities the Pwnage tool has been delayed. We'll keep you updated with any release information as we get it. [iPhone Dev Team]

[Parental Street Cred via Xbox 360 Fanboy]

Steampunkish? You bet. Still, I bet he can kick Hulk's ass. At least for two minutes. Iron Monger, un cappuccino, prego? [io9 and Toysrevil]

The 10-minute video documents the perfect flight of Skyray 48, the Boeing-NASA prototype of what could be the future of commercial aviation. Thanks to its design, designs derived from the X-48B will have less power consumption and less emissions, while increasing carrying capacity and speed compared with current cargo and passenger aircraft.

The plane took off last year from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base, in California, controlled from the ground by Boeing pilot Norm Howell. [NASA]

And yes, I like to say "swede." I like swedes, some of my best friends are swedes, and I want to move to Sweden. I can't have enough of the TIE Fighters here either.

[StarWars Blog]

Located in Bordeaux, France, this house is like a space station waiting to be launched into orbit. Looking at it, you would expect the X-Men to walk by at any time. However, it also has a warm, sunny quality that makes it absolutely amazing. Koolhass Houselife is a film that captures these qualities perfectly, but adds another, more practical dimension to it by showing this high-tech home from the perspective of Guadalupe Acedo, the housekeeper and the person who actually has to take care of keeping all this amazing design alive.

Jesús Díaz: I find very interesting that you decided to focus on the live of the house itself, through the life of the housekeeper. What made you take that view?"
Ila Bêka: Koolhaas HouseLife is the first film of a series we are making on contemporary architecture entitled "Living Architectures." The concept of these movies is to develop a look on contemporary architecture that tries to escape from a strong current tendency of idealized representation of our architectural heritage that show us architecture as perfect icons and break the link between architecture and the life which is inside.

The character of the housekeeper, Guadalupe Acedo, embodies in itself this image reversal we are looking for, because during all the film she points out the complex world of daily life, the care and maintenance such a house requires.

JD: What was the main challenge in filming this house, compared to your other architecture pieces?
IB: The three films we have already done are each one exploring a different scale. Koolhaas HouseLife enters in the daily life intimacy of a private house. Pomerol, Herzog & de Meuron talks about a Herzog & de Meuron refectory for grape pickers, and Xmas Meier is a urban investigation of the impact of the Richard Meier's new church in the Tor Tre Teste neighbourhood, in the suburbs of Rome.

But the main intention of the Koolhaas HouseLife project was to "give life" to one of these architectural masterpieces that we can see everywhere without never being able to see them how they "really" are in everyday life.

JD: The concept is great indeed, but also the photography, which is beautiful. What equipment did you use for filming and editing?
IB: For this type of projects we have to be very "light" in order to be almost "forgotten" by the persons we follow in their daily activities. We try to work only in two, one for the camera and one for the sound. The video editing has been made on Final Cut Pro and the sound editing with Logic Studio, with a last generation Mac Pro. [Bêkafilms, Stories of Houses, and Wikipedia via Archidose]