ABC’s reality robot battle show BattleBots, which first hit the air in 2000, will be returning to “BattleBox” it out again.
The seventh season premiere will be aired by ABC in a 8/7 Central Time slot, starting June 23.
The robot makers have already entered their bots in a pre-season competition to decide which bots would make it into the BattleBots season 2 series.
From the early matches, many of the old robot weapons will be seen again this summer, such as rotating saws, swinging hammers, and flame throwers. However, the new robot weapons have also been described as “explosive” by commenters present at the event.
An important consideration is that the robot targets of these weapons are metal and electronics based — other robots — rather than the targets of many other weapons being developed — people.
The robot battles are not just matters of which robot has the best weapons, according to robot builders. Tactics and strategy are also important in winning a match. The battles are round-robins, so robots must be able to continue battling in future rounds to win the prize.
For the upcoming season, BattleBot matches will again be 2-minutes long, followed by a review of the match with commentary by the judges, who determine the winner.
According to the Nikola Motor Company, this 2,000 horsepower electric semi tractor will “even the playing field” between owner operators and large fleets.
Explaining the project, NMC founder Trevor Milton said that he wanted to try to help trucking owner-operators. His plans focus around building the Nikola Ona, a 2,000 horsepower, 3,700-plus ft. lbs. torque tractor that can travel around 1,200 miles (1,931 km) on a charge.
The 6X6 truck is capable of pulling a total gross of 80,000 pounds (36,287 kg) with its 335 horsepower motor and dual gear reduction at every wheel, according to NMC. The foot torque is around 86,000 after gear reduction.
“Torque is instant with an electric motor,” commented Milton. “There is a short window of RPM that you can get good torque from a diesel engine. The electric motor is basically providing 100 percent torque all the time.”
The truck is also lighter — around 2,000 pounds lighter — than regular diesels, according to Milton. This is because the batteries in the electric truck weight less than a diesel engine, and, of course, the truck doesn’t have a diesel engine, or transmission (there’s just an electric and a brake pedal), drive-train, and related weight.
The electric power system provides benefits to the environment, but it also means the designers can enlarge the cab and adjust its shape — in this case, making it more aerodynamic, which can translate into a quieter, more comfortable driving experience.
It will also have the first-ever independent suspension in the industry, thanks to a partnership with Meritor.
“By working together with some of the top engineering firms in America, we were able to design vehicles that have previously been thought impossible to design,” said Milton. “We want to even the playing field and income inequalities seen between owner operators and fleets for the first time in recent trucking history.
“This is just the beginning of what’s ahead for America, our company and the electric vehicle market.”
The cost of purchasing a Nikola One: $350,000 – $415,000. The cost of operating one: 20 – 30 cents per mile.
The company is taking pre-orders for a fully-refundable down payment of $1,500. The first 5,000 orders will also come with a “free fuel program,” in which drivers will get an “allowance of 100,000 gallons of compressed natural gas.”
A Scottish man was arrested and put in jail for “suspicion of hate crime” after police saw a video the man had uploaded to YouTube of Meechan joking that he had trained his girlfriend’s dog, Buddha, to respond to phrases reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
The two-and-a-half minute video begins with an intruduction of a joking Meechan explaining that he was going to teach his girlfriend’s “cute” dog the “least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi.”
He repeats the phrase excitedly, “Gas the Jews?” and “Seig Heil” while the dog tries to lift a paw.
The video has been viewed over 1.5 million times on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYslEzHbpus
Meechan was released from jail. A report was sent to the procurator fiscal about the possibility of a breach of the electronic communications act of 2003.
Police commented on the arrest, saying, ‘This arrest should serve as a warning to anyone posting such material online, or in any other capacity, that such views will not be tolerated.”
Detective Inspector David Cockburn also commented, “I would ask anyone who has had the misfortune to have viewed it to think about the pain and hurt the narrative has caused a minority of people in our community.
“The clip is deeply offensive and no reasonable person can possibly find the content acceptable in today’s society.”
“This clip has been shared and viewed online, which ultimately has caused offence and hurt to many people in our community.”
“There is no place for hate crime in Scotland and police take all reports of incidents seriously.”
Meechan later posted another video where he expressed concern that the accusations would make people think he was actually a racist, while his friends and small YouTube following generally know him for his sense of humor, and the video had just unexpectedly gone viral. The video included lengthy apologies and explanations by both Meechan and his girlfriend that the video was not intended to offend, and Meechan was not racist.
March protest just confirmed due to communications clampdown in area
Sonam Tso, a mother of five, carried out a self-immolation protest on Wednesday 23 March 2016, in Dzoege County, Ngaba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. News of the protest only emerged from Tibet yesterday due to communication restrictions in the area.
The protest took place around midday near Sera monastery in Dzoege County in Ngaba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Sonam Tso and her husband, Kalsang Gyaltsen, were walking around the monastery. At one point she asked him to go ahead and said she would join him later. A few minutes later one of the monks heard someone calling for the return of the Dalai Lama and freedom for Tibet. He then saw Sonam Tso on fire and calling out the slogans. He called for help then he and Sonam’s Tso’s husband tried to put out the flames. With the help of another monk named Tsultrim, who was also Sonam Tso’s uncle, they brought her body inside the monastery and arranged a vehicle to take her to hospital. However, she died before they were able to leave the monastery.
Sonam Tso was around 50 years old and the mother of five children, three daughters and two sons. She was from Dotsa village, within the same township as Sera monastery.
Tsultrim was arrested after the protest on charges of having shared information about Sonam Tso’s self-immolation. He was released after eight days in detention and was forced to delete the photograph he had taken of the protest. Kalsang Gyaltsen was also called in for questioning three times.
Sonam Tso’s is the second self-immolation to take place inside Tibet during 2016. The earlier protest was carried out by a monk named Kalsang Wangdu on 29 February 2016. To date, more than 140 Tibetans have set themselves alight protesting China’s rule in Tibet.
Free Tibet director Eleanor Byrne-Rosengren said:
“The time that it has taken for this news to reach us is indicative of the repressive conditions that Tibetans inside Tibet are forced to live under. That same repression is responsible for Sonam Tso’s death. China continues to try and blame the self-immolations on outside influence or to attribute them to non-political causes. It is long past time that other governments and the world’s media were willing to acknowledge the ugly truth: every Tibetan who dies in a self-immolation protest has been killed by China.”
Information confirmed and supplied to Free Tibet by Tibet Watch.
What would you guess for the square footage of this tiny home? Hint: It’s really a tiny home!
It might look bigger from the outside (in the photo above), but this tiny home is only 500 square feet. How could that be?
I was a bit surprised myself, but even though this house is tiny, it still has a lot of creature comforts and home furnishings. There’s antique timbers used in the construction, as well as pine beams.
A special feature is the old Civil-War era wood used for the floors. It’s plank flooring from a reclaimed ammunition factory from that war.
There’s also a desk area, a sleeping area (which is 50 square feet itself), a fireplace, and the whole thing is done in natural colors: brown, green and black.
This tiny home was built by a team of two companies: TKP Architects and Old Greenwich Builders. It’s called the “Mountain Cottage.”
To locate TKP Architects and Old Greenwich Builders, click here.
War in the world’s youngest nation, South Sudan, may be drawing to a close, as rival leader and former vice president Riek Machar has returned to Juba to be sworn into office once again by President Salva Kiir.
Machar is to return to his post of vice president more than two years after a scuffle in the presidential building led to a splintering of the countries alliances. Political lines were largely drawn between the countries two largest tribal groups — Dinka and Nuer. Kiir is Dinka and Machar in Nuer.
Since December 2013, tens of thousands of South Sudanese have died — some in territorial military battles and others for nonpolitical reasons. The United Nations and other groups, which have provided assistance in the form of safe compounds, food, medicine, and protection, have struggled to keep track of the number of other atrocities committed in the lawless state.
Negotiations have been constantly urged by the U.N., the East African trade group EGAD, the United States, and other interested parties, all of which have tried to work towards peace, but agreements were regularly thwarted by irreconcilable disagreements, despite repeated claims by both sides that their foremost goal was peace for South Sudan.
Machar flew into Juba from neighboring Ethiopia April 26, one week after he was originally scheduled to arrive. Last minute negotiations about the manpower and weapons Machar would be allowed to bring with him delayed the trip.
Upon landing in the capital, Machar proceeded immediately to the presidential palace, where he is expected to be sworn into office in the near future.
The government of Norway is appealing the verdict delivered last week that found that the state did violate political mass killer Anders Breivik’s human rights guaranteed under the European Convention on Human Rights.
The state had, in the eyes of the court, subjected Breivik to inhuman and degrading treatment.
“The prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment represents a fundamental value in a democratic society,” Judge Helen Andenaes Sekulic stated. “This applies no matter what – including in the treatment of terrorists and killers.” Breivik had complained about solitary confinement, unpleasant treatment by prison staff, and unpleasant prison services.
However, the judge found that Breivik’s rights to marry had not been violated by the state, which had monitored and censored Breivik’s communications with the outside world.
Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen advance to the final round of the French election set for May 17.
Macron is a politically inexperienced former investment banker in favor of staying in the EU and reforming French economic laws. His supporters often consider Le Pen extremist.
Le Pen is anti-immigration and is in favor of laws restricting some public displays of Muslim culture, such as head scarves, in favor of “France first.” The group that supports this candidate is considered fairly far-Right, and they value more control for France, including being allowed to regulate the borders, manage their currency (devalue it if they want to), and to have tools to combat the ill effects of globalization.
Both candidates combined received less than 50% of the vote, so many people will be making a second choice in the election.
Easter Monday in Ireland will mark the centenary of a failed rebellion against British rule in Ireland, while April will see the anniversary of the birth of the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Two events that, at least for me, are connected and both are essential facets of how I see myself and my country. Though Oscar Wilde meant it as a slight, sometimes my passions are a quotation. Other times, a passport.
During the Rising, key buildings were taken over by Irish nationalists and bullets rained down on Dublin streets. The leaders and signatories of the 1916 Proclamation – people (and writers) such as Patrick Pearse and James Connolly – were captured and shot by the British government after the failure of the insurrection.
It was an uprising that occurred during a World War, an armed stand-off watched from afar by Lenin in Moscow, it was more than just a local affair. Indeed, Indian doctors studying medicine in Dublin joined the resistance, as did many Jews who had immigrated into Ireland throughout the 19th Century. All told, Irish nationalism – as it usually does – enjoyed an internationalist dimension, a sentiment chorused in our national anthem Amhrn na bhFiann, and underlined by the outward looking human rights advocacy of the State from the 1960s onwards.
The Poets
Though this is not an account of the 1916 Rising per se. Exiled as I am by the failure of the Celtic Tiger and my own wanderlust, this significant memory in the collective Irish soul gives pause for reflection on my sense of Irishness and how it is wrapped up in Seamus Heaney and a Chilean – Pablo Neruda. I do, of course, identify with the men and women who gave their lives for a free Ireland, but this a more personal account of what Ireland respresents to me – an Irish nationalist safe from British guns and a writer who, hitherto, has not been recognized with a Nobel Prize for Literature.
I grew up on Heaney and Neruda. I also grew up on Capri-Suns and Batman, but that is a reminiscence for another day. The two men were quite political in their writings, the former lamenting the ravages of Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the latter forlorn over the destruction of the Spanish Civil War and the legacy of empires. They both shared a need to preserve ordinary people an ordinary objects. Heaney celebrates his mother and ‘her white nails… raising scones against two ticking clocks’ and another poem speaks of the wallets and keys strewn across the road, exploded from the pockets of the recently blown up by the bombs of paramilitary forces. Neruda, for his part, catalogued plants and rocks, mountains, books, and food until he fell in exhaustion into his poem Too Many Names, a poem where ‘time lost its shoes’ and the poet breaks the fourth wall and obliterates his structure. Think the Coen Brothers and Barton Fink, but less playfully and more with a whine.
Right now, aside from watching the official commemoration of 1916 from afar, I am reading – and listening – to Heaney and his epic translation of Beowulf. The New York Times called it a better Beowulf and went on to tease out the irony of man with a dislike of the dominance the English language had over the Gaelic tongue translating one of the defining texts in Anglo-Saxon culture. You can read the superb analysis of the translation here.
It is a work that links me again to the words of Neruda, particularly his work And How Long? Both texts focus on atempts to give life to things – ideas, nature, nations. If Beowulf dies, and if Neruda tires, what are we to do? If the Irish State is turning a 100 soon, where do we go? Time is the knife that cuts all our imagined and realised hopes into successes, failures, and missed opportunities.
Dublin on the night Ireland becomes a Republic
In general, they shared more things. The equality proclaimed by 1916 extended to how these poets wanted their poems to be transmitted and to the audience they hoped to reach. While Heaney called Eminem a modern poet and showed himself adaptable to the evolution of the artistic use of language, Neruda busied himself with writing poems that could be recited out loud and to everybody. No child of poetry would be left behind.
The role of nature ran through the different periods of Neruda, from the ‘tomatoes, stars of the earth’ of Ode to the Tomato finding roots in Heaney and his Death of a Naturalist, where little children observed frogs to see the weather ‘yellow in the sun, brown in the rain’.
Reflections
A recent opinion piece in TheIrish Times was titled – Our independence sprang from more than violence alone, and it is true. We had a democractic mandate from the people, an organized government staffed with brilliant men and women, and a cultural breath that gave life to the nascent organs of the emerging State. There was also an internationalism that bridged the geographical synapses of different peoples and nations that shared a common sense of how a nation should be organized and how the people within should be protected, an internationalism that has defined Ireland throughout its history.
In this Easter weekend and centenary of 1916, I doff my cap to two men so connected to my sense of self, to my Ireland. To Neruda, the poet hailed by the people as their voice, and Heaney, ‘whose passport green… never toasted the British Queen’ – two men who turned their back on imperialism and their souls and pens toward a common humanity. A common humanity hoped for by 1916, with the promise of universal sufferage and equal rights. We come full circle, like all the arcs of all the poets that reach in themselves and find the world.
Requiem for the Croppies by Seamus Heaney
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley…
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp…
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching… on the hike…
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until… on Vinegar Hill… the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August… the barley grew up out of our grave.
