News today: robot cat; ultrasociety; yum-yum

Marginal Revolution highlights Hasbro's new 'companion for the elderly', the 'Joy for All' pet.

The linked Yahoo tech article continues:

“Joy for All” pets are robotic cats that “look, feel, and sound like real cats,” Hasbro claims on its website, which allows customers to choose from one of three varietals — orange tabby, silver, and creamy white. Noting that these pretend pets are “so much more than soft fur, soothing purrs, and pleasant meows,” the toy company claims that the robots “respond to petting, hugging, and motion much like the cats you know and love. This two-way give-and-take helps create a personally rich experience that can bring fun, joy, and friendship to you and your loved ones ages 5 to 105.”

Here's a gruesome YouTube video of the US$99 toy ...

... but it doesn't seem to do much more than Cindy and Daisy.

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In other news I bought "Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth" by Peter Turchin (h/t Razib Khan).

Peter Turchin writes:

"We organize ourselves into communities of hundreds of millions of individuals, inhabit every continent, and send people into space. Human beings are nature’s greatest team players. And the truly astounding thing is, we only started our steep climb to the top of the rankings–overtaking wasps, bees, termites and ants–in the last 10,000 years. Genetic evolution can’t explain this anomaly. Something else is going on. How did we become the ultrasocial animal?

In his latest book, the evolutionary scientist Peter Turchin (War and Peace and War) solves the puzzle using some astonishing results in the new science of Cultural Evolution. The story of humanity, from the first scattered bands of Homo Sapiens right through to the greatest empires in history, turns out to be driven by a remorseless logic. Our apparently miraculous powers of cooperation were forged in the fires of war. Only conflict, escalating in scale and severity, can explain the extraordinary shifts in human society–and society is the greatest military technology of all."

You've got to have a soft spot for such refreshing enthusiasm for unremitting combat.

Peter has self-published this on Kindle and pleads for reviews to help it sell (rather as Linda Nagata did for her 'Red' Trilogy). I intend to help him along once I've finished the Great Collider book (about the Chinese proposal to build a successor to the LHC).

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PS. Zena Skinner's Christmas Cake recipe has now been accessed 141 times.

... (update: Tuesday Nov 24th - 160 times).

Beryl Seel meets Daisy

You may remember Daisy, the animatronic cat who demonstrated her repertoire a few days ago (here). Well today, she finally got to meet my mother - they seemed to get on.

If these animals could only talk - I'd buy ... .

Slow news day

It's a wet Sunday - what can I tell you? The gym was pretty deserted this morning but, fuelled by massive over-indulgence in trifle last night, I did pretty well, especially on the resistance machines.

Later I started Lecture 2 on General Relativity by acclaimed Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind. Once of the best teachers in the world talking about one of the most tedious subjects (covariant and contravariant tensors, and transformations of the metric tensor): I literally fell asleep after 25 minutes.

And then this video. The setting is Marissal Road, Henbury, Bristol. Alex and Adrian, together with my sister Elaine, are visiting my mother (this was some years ago). I am my usual bumptious, overbearing self with a camera; my mother (with her robot cat, Cindy) is inveigled into the role of camera-person.

Despite everything, it's quite amusing.

Daisy

Our very own synth, Daisy, arrived here today. It's destined to join Cindy (video here) as my mother's new animatronic pet. Here's a video of Daisy (Amazon link) showing off her repertoire.

We bought Cindy (below) for my mother seven years ago. I am amazed that so little progress has been made in the state of the art.

Cindy - my mother's robot pet

Family history note: Daisy was my mother's auntie. Oh, and here's Daisy's manual.

Click on image to make larger.