While we are better known for other types of art robots (like the Eggbot and now the WaterColorBot), we have also been involved with cocktail robotics for the past few years.

After a half-dozen cocktail robotics event over the past couple of years, we’ve had a chance to refit our famous bar-bot, Drink Making Unit 2.0, with a few well-earned upgrades.  Read on for the gory details!

A little background: cocktail robotics is a peculiar sub-field of robotics, where the goal is generally to prepare beverages (alcoholic or otherwise) by automated processes, where bartender-grade showmanship and presentation count far more than efficiency. (You can read more about cocktail robots here and here.)

In 2011, we introduced a cocktail robot named Drink Making Unit 2.0, which we brought to that year’s BarBot exhibition. DMU 2.0, as it is affectionately known, was built out of laser-cut acrylic, fitted with chemistry labware (including six each erlenmeyer flasks and graduated cylinders), and driven by a user-operated control panel that lets each person decide how they would like their drink mixed, from a set of six ingredients.

Typically, the set of six ingredients consists of vodka and mixers, but the nameplates on DMU 2.0 are interchangeable, so it can be used just as easily with nonalcoholic ingredient sets such as an array of different juices, lemonade and flavorings (such as raspberry, strawberry, cherry, and mint), or italian syrups for topping snow cones or making italian sodas.

The way that DMU 2.0 works is that little air pumps inside the controller box push air into the flasks, that then push out their fluid contents into the graduated cylinders.  When a given cylinder is full enough, it tips over, dumping its contents into the funnel, which fall into the waiting glass below, in a mechanism inspired by the deer chaser in a Japanese garden.

For the upgrade, we decided to add the option to also use a seventh “main” ingredient, that is pumped separately from the other six. Not only does this give the option of holding one more ingredient, but it can also logically separate the ”carrier” ingredient if there is one.

It’s easy to see why you might want to do this: If you’re making italian sodas, we can pump a fixed quantity of club soda, yet allow the person who will be drinking the soda to select the mix of the flavoring syrups.  Similarly, we can use a set of lemonade and six flavors, or with the vodka based ingredient set, vodka plus six mixers.

And for the seventh-ingredient pump, we continued with the chemistry lab theme, although at a bit higher level.  We picked up this fine peristaltic pump at one of our local surplus shops, labeled with a sticker that said “works.”

We also needed a switch so that you can disable the “main” ingredient.  (For example, to allow the same setup to make both italian sodas and snowcones, or to disable the vodka in the mixed-drink setup.)

We wanted our switch to be appropriately satisfying to use, and we found an old surplus switch that fit the bill– it’s a lot like the type found on some older desktop computer power supplies. It’s big and red and makes a satisfying “clunk” when you flip it.

 

 

Because of the way that the switch rocks, we did not actually need that big of a cutout.  We made a little test fixture to try it out and see how it would look, to prepare for cutting a hole in the front panel.

And then, we cut the new hole in our tortoiseshell-plastic front panel, made a matching label plate, and installed the switch.

We made a few other (less visible) changes under the hood of the controller.

First, we upgraded the air pumps. In the original configuration of DMU 2.0, three of the six air pumps were piston pumps, and the other three were diaphragm pumps. (You can see how that looked here.) At the time, we considered them to be interchangeable. However, after two years of occasional use, we have found the diaphragm pumps to occasionally have trouble starting, presumably due to degradation of the rubber diaphragms.  The piston pumps have consistently worked well.  So, we replaced the diaphragm pumps and now have a neat array of six green piston pumps.

We’ve also changed the power supply configuration.  The controller box runs entirely on battery power.  Previously, we had two D cells to operate the pumps, and three AA cells to operate the controller circuitry. It turns out that the motors seem to operate just fine at 4.5 V, so we’ve removed the AA cells, and standardized to run the entire box (motors, LEDs, and control circuitry) all from one set of three D cells.

 

Here, you can see the new input that connects to the front panel 7th channel switch.

 

And finally, we added an output that goes to a Power Switch Tail, so that our controller box can easily control the peristaltic pump for the 7th channel.

The updated controller box is pretty snazzy!

We’re still using those warm white candle-flicker LEDs, underneath the tortoiseshell plastic— it gives quite a remarkable anachronistic look and feel to the box.

On the other side of the robot, we have the peristaltic pump.  The seventh ingredient (vodka, in this case) sits in a 1 liter erlenmeyer flask, in an ice bucket atop the pump.

The other end of the silicone tubing coming from the peristaltic pump is directed right into the output funnel.  This lets us “wash” the funnel as it goes, keeping it clean for everyone and making better drinks.

And that’s Drink Making Unit 2.1, now field-tested and ready for the next couple years of cocktail robotics adventure.

Source: NASA

 

Hat tip Slate

“The moon is a white strange world… The moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. When we describe the moon as dead we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.”

- D.H. Lawrence, Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse by Frederick Carter 

Creation myths of various cultures around the world with a focus on Mesoamerica.

The Separation of Powers Which Define Our Democracy Have Been Destroyed

The Department of Justice told a federal court this week that the NSA’s spying “cannot be challenged in a court of law”.

(This is especially dramatic given that numerous federal judges and legal scholars – including a former FISA judge – say that the FISA spying “court” is nothing but a kangaroo court.)

Also this week, the Department of Justice told a federal court that the courts cannot review the legality of the government’s assassination by drone of Americans abroad:

“‘Are you saying that a US citizen targeted by the United States in a foreign country has no constitutional rights?’ [the judge]  asked Brian Hauck, a deputy assistant attorney general. ‘How broadly are you asserting the right of the United States to target an American citizen? Where is the limit to this?’

“She provided her own answer: ‘The limit is the courthouse door’ . . . .

“‘Mr. Hauck acknowledged that Americans targeted overseas do have rights, but he said they could not be enforced in court either before or after the Americans were killed.’”

(Indeed, the Obama administration has previously claimed the power to be judge, jury and executioner in both drone and cyber-attacks.  This violates Anglo-Saxon laws which have been on the books in England and America for 800 years.)

The Executive Branch also presents “secret evidence” in many court cases … sometimes even hiding the evidence from the judge who is deciding the case.

Bush destroyed much of the separation of powers which made our country great.  But under Obama, it’s gotten worse.

For example, the agency which decides who should be killed by drone is the same agency which spies on all Americans.

Daniel Ellsberg notes that even the Founding Fathers didn’t have to deal with a government claiming that it could indefinitely detain Americans … even on American soil.

After Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and others sued the government to enjoin the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans – the judge asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys. The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge

The Department of Justice has also tapped Congressional phones, and a high-level NSA whistleblower says that the NSA is spying on – and blackmailing – top government officials and military officers including all 9 Supreme Court justices.

It’s not just the Executive Branch which has attacked the courts.  For example, Congress passed a bill stripping courts of the power to review issues related to genetically modified foods.

The Constitution is mortally mounded.  While the “war on terror” is commonly cited as the excuse, most of the attacks on our rights started before 9/11.  Indeed, the Founding Fathers warned 200 years ago that open-ended wars give the Executive an excuse to take away our liberties.

Two former U.S. Supreme Court Justices have warned that America is sliding into tyranny.   A former U.S. President, and many other high-level American officials agree.

In addition to attacks on the judiciary by the White House and Congress, judges are voluntarily gutting the justice system … and laying down in lapdog-obeisance to D.C.

For example, the Supreme Court ruled that if judges don’t like plaintiffs’ allegations of bad government actions, the judge can simply pre-judge and throw out the lawsuit before even allowing the party to conduct any discovery to prove their claims.   This guts 220 years of Constitutional law, and makes it extremely difficult to challenge harmful government action in court.

America has a “dual justice system … one for ordinary people and then one for people with money and enormous wealth and power”.

Indeed, most Americans have less access to justice than Botswanans … and are more abused by police than Kazakhstanis.

DavidHumus writes "Some of the longer-term effects of the anti-vaccination movement of past decades are now evident in a dramatic increase in measles. From the article: 'A measles outbreak infected 1,219 people in southwest Wales between November 2012 and early July, compared with 105 cases in all of Wales in 2011. One of the infected was Ms. Jenkins, whose grandmother, her guardian, hadn't vaccinated her as a young child. "I was afraid of the autism," says the grandmother, Margaret Mugford, 63 years old. "It was in all the papers and on TV."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've been told that boiled peanuts are an acquired taste. I wouldn't know, because I've loved them for too long to remember. I can't picture a day at the beach or the lake without a bowl of boiled peanuts, the contents dwindling as the pile of shells on the sand grows. We usually eat them in the summer, possibly because that's the only time I can stay close to the stove long enough to make them. They make a great snack, or a light meal if you just can't leave your beach chair to make dinner.

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One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government's spying on American citizens is that it's only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there's a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of "terrorism" and "weapon of mass destruction" are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism.

Back in 2002, the Patriot Act greatly broadened the definition of terrorism to include all sorts of "normal" violent acts as well as non-violent protests. The term "terrorist" is surprisingly broad; since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it has been applied to people you wouldn't normally consider terrorists.

The most egregious example of this are the three anti-nuclear pacifists, including an 82-year-old nun, who cut through a chain-link fence at the Oak Ridge nuclear-weapons-production facility in 2012. While they were originally arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, the government kept increasing their charges as the facility's security lapses became more embarrassing. Now the protestors have been convicted of violent crimes of terrorism -- and remain in jail.

Meanwhile, a Tennessee government official claimed that complaining about water quality could be considered an act of terrorism. To the government's credit, he was subsequently demoted for those remarks.

The notion of making a terrorist threat is older than the current spate of anti-terrorism craziness. It basically means threatening people in order to terrorize them, and can include things like pointing a fake gun at someone, threatening to set off a bomb, and so on. A Texas high-school student recently spent five months in jail for writing the following on Facebook: "I think I'ma shoot up a kindergarten. And watch the blood of the innocent rain down. And eat the beating heart of one of them." Last year, two Irish tourists were denied entry at the Los Angeles Airport because of some misunderstood tweets.

Another term that's expanded in meaning is "weapon of mass destruction." The law is surprisingly broad, and includes anything that explodes, leading political scientist and terrorism-fear skeptic John Mueller to comment:

As I understand it, not only is a grenade a weapon of mass destruction, but so is a maliciously-designed child's rocket even if it doesn't have a warhead. On the other hand, although a missile-propelled firecracker would be considered a weapon of mass destruction if its designers had wanted to think of it as a weapon, it would not be so considered if it had previously been designed for use as a weapon and then redesigned for pyrotechnic use or if it was surplus and had been sold, loaned, or given to you (under certain circumstances) by the secretary of the army ....

All artillery, and virtually every muzzle-loading military long arm for that matter, legally qualifies as a WMD. It does make the bombardment of Ft. Sumter all the more sinister. To say nothing of the revelation that The Star Spangled Banner is in fact an account of a WMD attack on American shores.

After the Boston Marathon bombings, one commentator described our use of the term this way: "What the United States means by terrorist violence is, in large part, 'public violence some weirdo had the gall to carry out using a weapon other than a gun.' ... Mass murderers who strike with guns (and who don't happen to be Muslim) are typically read as psychopaths disconnected from the larger political sphere." Sadly, there's a lot of truth to that.

Even as the definition of terrorism broadens, we have to ask how far we will extend that arbitrary line. Already, we're using these surveillance systems in other areas. A raft of secret court rulings has recently expanded the NSA's eavesdropping powers to include "people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks." A "little-noticed provision" in a 2008 law expanded the definition of "foreign intelligence" to include "weapons of mass destruction," which, as we've just seen, is surprisingly broad.

A recent Atlantic essay asks, somewhat facetiously, "If PRISM is so good, why stop with terrorism?" The author's point was to discuss the value of the Fourth Amendment, even if it makes the police less efficient. But it's actually a very good question. Once the NSA's ubiquitous surveillance of all Americans is complete -- once it has the ability to collect and process all of our emails, phone calls, text messages, Facebook posts, location data, physical mail, financial transactions, and who knows what else -- why limit its use to cases of terrorism? I can easily imagine a public groundswell of support to use to help solve some other heinous crime, like a kidnapping. Or maybe a child-pornography case. From there, it's an easy step to enlist NSA surveillance in the continuing war on drugs; that's certainly important enough to warrant regular access to the NSA's databases. Or maybe to identify illegal immigrants. After all, we've already invested in this system, we might as well get as much out of it as we possibly can. Then it's a short jump to the trivial examples suggested in the Atlantic essay: speeding and illegal downloading. This "slippery slope" argument is largely speculative, but we've already started down that incline.

Criminal defendants are starting to demand access to the NSA data that they believe will exonerate themselves. How can a moral government refuse this request?

More humorously, the NSA might have created the best backup system ever.

Technology changes slowly, but political intentions can change very quickly. In 2000, I wrote in my book Secrets and Lies about police surveillance technologies: "Once the technology is in place, there will always be the temptation to use it. And it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state." Today we're installing technologies of ubiquitous surveillance, and the temptation to use them will be overwhelming.

This essay originally appeared in TheAtlantic.com.

A better curriculum by Tyler Feder

Figure study by Fred Lyon

As seen at Comic-Con International: San Diego this weekend, this trailer gives me great hope for this new version of Cosmos, one of the most beloved science fact television shows of all time, with a geek-favorite host.

Read more on MAKE

Frozach Submitted

Half-man prank. [video]

Pesto partay! Check out these 16 fun variations on your standard old basil recipe.

Rejected Chrysler Building designs.