While the Sparrow reminded me of a gigantic shnoz, this one reminds me of a fish (one of those tall, skinny ones, not a blowfish).

Would you want to do 150 MPH (top speed) in this thing? Or 0 to 60 in 4 seconds?

Amazingly, it is not easy to tip.

Honda is working on the “next generation ASIMO humanoid robot”:http://www.japancorp.net/Article.asp?Art_ID=9021, and their early progress is pretty exciting. ASIMO can run (if only at 3kph), shake hands (thanks to new sensors), avoid obstacles, and cock its head as though to ask, “Why do I only have a 1-hour battery?”

The Honda ASIMO site has “video clips of the research model”:http://world.honda.com/HDTV/ASIMO/ — pretty impressive stuff.

It seems that Leonardo Da Vinci hasn’t ceased to astound. This month’s Wired has an article about a three-wheeled cart designed by Leonardo that may actually be a “physically programmable robot”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/davinci.html. As Keanu would say, “_Whoa._”

I bet it was unrelenting brown thumbery and general frustration with the higher-level voodoo that is biochemistry that led these engineers to master their foliage in ways no horticulturist, nor the foliage itself, could have ever imagined. The hills really could be alive with the sound of music.