If you haven’t seen Colbert’s roast at the White House Correspondent’s dinner, watch it at C&L. TMV has a good rundown of the various blogohedron responses to the performance- mostly positive, with much praise lavished on Colbert’s balls, and a smattering of “wow he totally bombed” comments from the right.
But Bloggledygook has one comment worth [...]

that I know.
Here’s some stuff to make up for my slobbiness.

From CNN: Warriors of the future will ‘taste’ battlefield
A narrow strip of red plastic connects the Brain Port to the tongue where 144 microelectrodes transmit information through nerve fibers to the brain.
In testing, blind people found doorways, noticed people walking in front of them and [...]

link
(click on ‘Robotic Chair’)

There, I said it.
Ars Technica reports on a recent study (pdf) on mobile search use. The study is worth reading on its own, but AT focuses the porn.
Less than 10 percent of all searches done on PCs these days are porn scavenger hunts, a number that is down 50 percent from 1997. As the Web [...]

Wired: VR Games Pit Pets Against Owners (via Engadget)
“We want to enable pets to play games in a way very similar to the way human players’ play,” said RASTER’s Vladimir Todoroviæ, a collaborator working on the Metazoa Ludens project. “To play a computer game with your hamster would definitely make us think about where we [...]

Noelle models range from a $3,200 basic version to a $20,000 computerized Noelle that best approximates a live birth.
She can be programmed for a variety of complications and for cervix dilation. She can labor for hours and produce a breach baby or unexpectedly give birth in a matter of minutes.
She ultimately delivers a plastic doll [...]

Microvisions
by Adam Rex
Currently on auction at eBay. Link via BoingBoing.

Sorry for the extended break, but I’ve got a prelim to write. I should be back to normal after the conference.
Footnote 21 from my dissertation proposal, “Rethinking Machines”, section 2.3, in which I discuss the objection that my view is suspiciously pan-psychist.
In other words, if I want to take out the trash, I can do [...]

Here’s an excerpt of my conversation with Stewart on the D&D forums about Bleecker’s article. The discussion is basically about the limits of participation, and Stewart does a pretty good job of bringing out some of the main features of the view. Its a bit long, but it gets better as it goes. By the [...]

Both via Endgadget

“Internet Renaissance Robot” shuns chores, entertains instead
This time it’s a robot that wants to present us with info, but instead of merely reading text off of an RSS feed or blaring a few music streams, the ITR bot works with its very own “RTML” language to present media with motion, voice, and [...]