August 2009

Agile robots, dexterous robots (with videos)

August 27, 2009

“Big Dog”: An agile quadruped robotClimbing a hill.     Slipping on ice. Climbing down.     The leap. (See potentially disturbing video) Brought to you by Boston Dynamics and DARPA A fast, dexterous robotic hand The hand.    Motion blur. The toss.    The catch. (See potentially disturbing video) Brought to you by the Ishikawa Komuro [...]

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Comments on Science, Engineering,
and Innovation for The Drucker Institute

August 20, 2009

An audio clip from Drucker Appsat The Drucker Institute I was recently invited by the Drucker Institute to outline my thinking on innovation, and I discussed how managers can help to resolve some surprisingly deep communication problems at the interface between science and engineering. They’ve posted a two-minute extract as a audio clip their current [...]

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“Nanotechnologies in Russia”
interview now available

August 13, 2009

www.nanometer.ru (and English translation) The logo looks like an axial projection of a structure that I designed in the early 1990s. A few months ago, I gave an interview for the scientific journal “Nanotechnologies in Russia”, and the result has now been posted at www.nanometer.ru, a leading Russian-language portal dedicated to nanotechnology. This website provides [...]

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Asia and the elements of innovation

August 6, 2009

A map of China rendered in DNA Origami:A prompt replication of the initial origami work The worldwide management consulting firm McKinsey & Company recently invited me to write about prospects for innovation in Asia, as a contribution to an ongoing discussion of where the world’s primary centers of innovation will be in the coming decades. [...]

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Evolutionary Capacity:
Why organisms cannot be like machines

August 2, 2009

I‘ve just posted a paper on evolution and the organization of complex systems at E-drexler.com. The paper discusses things like factories, paint, and conjoined twins to illustrate four crucial differences between machine-like and life-like systems. As an update, I added a preface that outlines the thesis of the paper and explains why the title (“Biological [...]

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