Six Useless Axes

A million years ago, in 2017, Teenage Engineering (previously) announced a new product in collaboration with Chinese tech company Baidu: a robotic smart speaker called R. It wasn't pure vaporware, either—a gorgeous little behind-the-scenes video from TE showed multiple prototypes. Clearly, at some level, a device like this is technologically feasible.

It would have been expensive, certainly—my totally uninformed guess is that the R would have retailed for between two and three grand.

But Baidu didn't move forward with the R, and I haven't seen any similar products even teased since, from TE or anyone else.

I have a DJI Osmo gimbal for my phone. It's a robotic selfie stick that smooths out rotation introduced by the movement of the user's hand. Its three motors are totally silent, it cost about a hundred bucks, and it's magical.

If I can buy a mass-market handheld three-axis robot for a hundred bucks, why can't I buy something like the R for a thousand? I don't know the answer, but I have a theory.

What would little a six-axis robot arm on my desk be useful for? Almost nothing.

What are we going to put on the end of the arm? Not a hand or gripper of any kind, obviously. We've got a six motor budget, and we've already used them all getting to six-axis movement.

You could attach a camera to the end, making it the world's smallest motion control rig. It'd be great at keeping the camera pointed at you as you wander the room (except we already do that in software). It also could do those perfect, repeatable, swoopy camera moves straight out of Hollywood—as long as you don't mind doing them around nothing bigger than a coffee mug.

What about holding a little display? Sure—in fact, combine that with the camera and it could follow you around a room, making sure the display is always facing you. With six-axis control, it could even stabilize the display relative to your eyes, making it feel almost like an augmented reality HUD. That would be cool and weird—but even if it enables this very specific illusion, that doesn't solve a problem or do anything obviously useful. It also might give you motion sickness.

With a pen attachment, it could draw things—slower and worse than a printer, of course.

You could put some kind of a mouse-like blob on the end and use it as an extremely impractical input device.

I still think someone should make one, even though there's only one thing it could really do better than anything else already cluttering my desk.

In addition to whatever else they do, our robots should also dance.

Luxo's Return ◼︎

Mere days ago, some caprice seized me to write about home robot arms and I tried to think of what you could usefully put on the end of one. All I came up with was "camera," "display," and "pen", totally blanking out on "lamp". Would you be surprised to learn that Apple's machine learning laboratory is smarter than me? There's something to this idea, I'm telling you. (via)

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Why Not Mars ◼︎

Maciej Cegłowski has made a persuasive case against human boots on Mars in the foreseeable future. Not only am I convinced that he's right in specific case, but ever since reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora a few years ago, I've largely divorced myself from the romantic falsehood of galactic manifest destiny. Let's just build more telescopes and robots while we work on fixing up where we are always, always, always going to live.

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The (lonely, discouraging) Journey to Nanite ◼︎

While acknowledging that not everybody finds deeply technical discussions of things they only faintly understand to be compelling viewing, I found Brian Karis's 90-minute keynote address totally engrossing. He discusses his year-long intellectual journey towards what became Unreal Engine 5's virtualized geometry technology not in terms of the technical triumph that it ultimately was but rather the messy process of dead-ends, hunches, and lonely groping in the dark that it took to get there.

In his relating of the experience of working on a problem where a solution was far from guaranteed, Karis's humility and curiosity are genuinely inspirational.

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The Flying Train ◼︎

Shot in 1902, “The Flying Train” takes viewers on an uncommonly crisp journey aboard a suspended railcar. Throughout the two-minute video, riders see Wuppertal residents walking across pedestrian bridges and down dirt roadways more than a century ago. The city is known still today for its schwebebahn, which is a style of hanging railway that’s unique to Germany.

This led me to look up the Wikipedia article for Wuppertal Schwebebahn, which in addition to being a still-functioning hanging rail system over a century old, is—if I don't miss my guess—a double dactyl.

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My Heart Will Go On, in Baseball Names ◼︎

Some things just really don't need much explanation.

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The Mysterious Life of Birds who Never Come Down ◼︎

They still seem to me the closest things to aliens on Earth. I’ve seen them up close now, held a live grounded adult in my hands before letting it fall back into the sky. You know those deep-sea fish dragged by nets from fathoms of blackness, how obvious it is that they aren’t supposed to exist where we are? The adult swift was like that in reverse. Its frame was tough and spare, and its feathers were bleached by the sun. Its eyes seemed unable to focus on me, as if it were an entity from an alternate universe whose senses couldn’t quite map onto our phenomenal world. Time ran differently for this creature.

This essay by Helen Macdonald has some of the most exquisite prose I have read in months and months.

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Japanese-to-English Translation Basics ◼︎

Once upon a time, when I was an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to take a translation seminar with one of the finest translators of Japanese literature into English. The course texts she selected for the seminar presented all manner of interesting translation challenges, and she brought in a number of fantastic speakers from the Kyoto-based Society of Writers, Editors, and Translators to discuss these challenges with our class. Unfortunately, I was not able to take full advantage of this seminar; it was as if these professional translators were teaching us translation calculus, and I still didn’t grasp basic translation algebra.

I'm a Japanese-to-English translator by trade—primarily of comics and genre fiction. If I'd read this essay sometime in the first five years or so of my career, I think it would have saved me the next five years of learning lessons the hard way. As it is, it still crystallized principles I've spent a decade internalizing. An absolute must-read for anyone interested in the exigencies of translation.

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Ghost of Tsushima and the Political Myth of the Samurai ◼︎

This is an absolutely fantastic piece by Kazuma Hashimoto on the ways in which the developers of the recent open-world RPG Ghost of Tsushima used an aesthetically evocative but politically and historically naive portrayal of samurai in their game:

The preservation of the Bushido code that was highly popularized and utilized by Imperial Japan lives on through promotion by history revisionists, who elevate samurai to a status similar to that of the chivalric knight seen in Western media. They are portrayed as an honor-bound and noble group of people that cared deeply for the peasantry, when that was often not the case.

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Minidiscs ◼︎

My favorite obsolete audio format is the Minidisc. My favorite kind of web site is an obsessively complete catalogue of obscure knowledge. (I had to set my browser's text encoding to "Cyrillic (Windows)" to make the text here render correctly, but the text is, to put it mildly, not the main event.)

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Perseverance & Ingenuity ◼︎

Amid all the—well, everything—I'd lost track of the fact that we're launching a new Mars rover this year. I thought Curiosity was badass (nuclear-powered, dropped from a sky crane), but this one has a fucking helicopter.

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