Meet the new dog, bigger and badder than the old (big) dog:

Video via Spectrum IEEE, which tells us more:

…those weights that AlphaDog is carrying in a few of the clips weigh a total of 400 pounds (180 kilograms), and the robot will be able to carry that load up to 20 miles (30 kilometers) over the course of 24 hours without having to refuel. At the end of the running demo (just after the 45 second mark), the robot collapses into the safety frame like that simply because it ran out of room, not because of any kind of mechanical problem. And notice how two people pushing as hard as they can don’t phase AlphaDog in the least, and in the event that it does tip over for some reason, it has no trouble self-righting, which is a useful new feature.

First robot-horse of the Apocalypse, or future coolest pizza delivery service ever?

Steve Fuller, apparently a philosopher-sociologist of science and technology has released this series of book ‘trailers’ for his latest work, Humanity 2.0. This is the Introduction:

The further into these trailers I got, the more concerned I became, and not just because he talks positively about Intelligent Design. What concerns me is EVERYTHING HE SAYS, and that his academic creditionals will lend authenticity to his… argument, and he will be taken as an expert by the media on the future of humanity. This man is what I am now calling a Maladaptor.

Unfortunately I don’t have the spare brain capacity at the moment to read and dissect his rationale in detail, but if you are willing to suffer so we don’t have to, please do so, send in your review/retort and we’ll publish a set of them here.

If the young are not initiated in to the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.
– African Proverb

This vernacular video documentary does an almost perfect job sketching out the complexity of the situation in the UK.

Which brings us to the F-word: FERAL:

In the sense of “abandoned by – or escaped from – society”, “living outside the mainstream”, “beyond the control of rules, regulations and accepted norms”, even “gone wild”, feral seems quite a reasonable choice of word to describe something big and faceless such as an economy, the media, or even, at a pinch, a powerful and privileged elite. But when you start applying it to people (youths, yobs), or to a disadvantaged group of people (an underclass), it’s somehow different. Then feral becomes, intentionally or not, dehumanising. Use it in that way and you’re comparing humans to animals. Which isn’t, can we agree, a very nice thing to do.

As Paul Raven tweeted, this is “the worst sort of Othering”, and why we shall never cease repeating here There Is No THEY!

Forgive me some gallows humor, but sometimes a smile is the best weapon against despair. Texas may be in the middle of its biggest ever recorded wildfires, but that didn’t get this water tower down. Here it is, despite the futility of its existence, putting on its happy face.

You can see more stark photos of our present of environmental collapse at the Austin American-Statesman’s photo blog, but remember the example of this lone piece of infrastructure, gifted to us from the past; the power of nightmares may have ruled our lives since the 1980s, but the future can belong to those who buy into it with a currency of optimism; it’s there waiting for us, we just have to take ownership of it.

via Bruce Sterling