DNA Lounge: Wherein the Fifth Annual Cocktail Robotics Grand Challenge is upon us.

5 years ago
This Sunday (SUNDAY, SUNDAY) you get to experience incredible robot bartenders serving you drinks, lovingly crafted with MAD SCIENCE by the finest competitors in the art of robotics and bartending.

You probably won't get wet. Probably.
Or disassembled. Probably.

I know I've posted about this a couple times already but that's because I legitimately love it so, and if you are reading this blog at all, I really think you will enjoy it as well.

We got a nice write-up in Make:

Each year the contestants are full of innovation and creativity. Past entrants who are returning include TikiTron by Dr. Bombay, which mixes eight cocktails from 12 ingredients and delivers them via glasses hidden deep in an active model volcano.

Another elegant robotic creation is the Tea Engine by Catherine, which serves tea from an antique 1920s coffee percolator that is ordered via rotary dial and served in fine China. There is an Arduino Uno in the rotary that reads the pulse dial for one of four options: plain tea, tea with peach schnapps, tea with ginger liquor, and tea with peach and ginger.

Prior to this! Can I interest you in Hubba Hubba Revue's Warrior Women show this Friday? The show opener will be a reprise of Dr. Kingfish and Ariyana La Fey doing their aerial re-enactment of the "Kill da Wabbit" bit from "What's Opera Doc". If you haven't seen this... you should see this.

And tomorrow being Friday the Thirteenth of July... it is the seventeenth anniversary of the re-opening of DNA Lounge on Friday the Thirteenth of July, 2001.

Seventeen years, WTF.

In other news, we finally sold our broke-ass La Marzocco espresso machine and bought a new one -- this time, an Izzo Alex Duetto IV. So that means you can get a delicious espresso now, right? Ha ha ha no. It's broken already. We can't have nice things.

Oh yeah, also we can't find our coffee grinders! We had two! They were like two feet tall and weighed a ton. I don't think we could have successfully thrown those away even if we tried -- our cleaning crew would have refused to take them. Which means someone must have put them "somewhere safe" that we have not yet located.

Anyway, come to some shows, k?

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Location: 37° 46' 15.63" N, 122° 24' 45.70" W

City Street Orientations

5 years ago
Geoff Boeing:

Each of the cities is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. Each bar's direction represents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings. [...]

Most cities' polar histograms similarly tend to cluster in at least a rough, approximate way. But then there are Boston and Charlotte.

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Monsters Are Real: Screeching Centipede Robot

5 years ago

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Facebook touts fight on fake news, but struggles to explain why InfoWars isn't banned

5 years ago
If you work for Facebook, quit.

After a short presentation showcasing Facebook's efforts to fight misinformation, John Hegeman, the head of Facebook's News Feed, and Sara Su, a Facebook product specialist for News Feed, took questions from reporters.

When asked by this reporter how the company could claim it was serious about tackling the problem of misinformation online while simultaneously allowing InfoWars to maintain a page with nearly one million followers on its website, Hegeman said that the company does not "take down false news."

"I guess just for being false that doesn't violate the community standards," Hegeman said, explaining that InfoWars has "not violated something that would result in them being taken down."

Hegeman added, "I think part of the fundamental thing here is that we created Facebook to be a place where different people can have a voice. And different publishers have very different points of view."

While publishers may certainly have a different point of view, InfoWars is no ordinary publisher, and the content it produces does not just offer "different points of view." The media organization is notorious for spreading demonstrably false information and conspiracy theories on a host of issues, including suggesting that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax staged by child actors. Earlier this year, the outlet smeared student survivors of the Parkland shooting with baseless attacks, portraying them in one video as actors.

Even on Wednesday, before and after Facebook defended its decision to allow InfoWars to operate on its website, InfoWars used the social media platform to spread baseless conspiracy theories. In one video posted to Facebook, InfoWars claimed billionaire George Soros wanted to "seize US voting machines." In another post, InfoWars, which has suggested that the September 11 terrorist attacks were an inside job, asked, "Will Trump expose the truth behind 9/11?"

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