Really though, I find their earlier work, The Table: Childhood, to be the superior piece of autonomous furniture artwork (though less impressive technically).

On a more pragmatic note, Matt seems to have quelled his typical worries over an imminent robot uprising. Instead he expresses concern that most robotics work is being funded by DARPA, and thus conducted with military applications in mind.

My impression, as a CS graduate student, is that DARPA (as oppose to NSF or NIH) funded research has access to much more money, but also more demands/pressure. This wasn’t always the case, and I do get the sense that attitudes toward DARPA funding has soured some in the past decade.

Getting an NSF grant is quite competitive, and hence professors tend to devote a lot of their time to grant writing. Also, a typical grant is not that large (say enough to support one or two graduate students for a few years), but once you have a grant, you need only submit annual progress updates, which are typically brief. The main “accountability factor” for such grants is one’s reputation. If you don’t publish valuable results, you’ll have a hard time getting future funding.

In contrast, DARPA grants can provide much larger sums of money for large projects of military interest (for example, bionic arms). Grant recipients, however, are likely required to produce quarterly progress updates, travel to progress reviews, and be available for meetings/presentations. As such, DARPA funded research is more susceptible to external pressure. Obviously this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s enough to make some academics reluctant.

In the case of robotics, I do think a lot of fundamental tools (for example, better object recognition, automatic path planning, object manipulation) could be developed in the context of a DARPA grant. The primary difference would be that the military provides access to fancier hardware. For example, iRobot makes small, inexpensive vacuums for consumers, and rugged but pricey PackBots for the military (they’re built Ford tough).

Despite my disappointment, I was keenly aware that, from a blogging perspective, not getting in was still a pretty solid outcome. First off, hundreds of people manage to attend each and every Daily Show taping, and millions see the resulting episode on TV, but how many poor schlubs get rejected after having reserved tickets, like 20 max. In short, this, right here, is the kind of first hand account of Daily Show rejection that only a handful of blogger’s are in a position to give. Plus, I now have a solid understanding of the logistics involved in going to see a Daily Show taping, and in the end, dear reader, isn’t that the reason you come to this blog?

LOGISTICS!

• You can request up to four (4) Daily Show tickets here. They’re booked many months in advance, but if you check back every few days, you’ll likely stumble on a cancellation. This works for The Colbert Report too.
• When sign up for tickets, the email asking for confirmation tells you to show up at 733 11th Ave (between 51st and 52nd) from 3:30 to 4:00. It also says that your guests can show up as late as 4:30. This isn’t particularly accurate.
• Since they don’t actually give you tickets until they start letting you in, anyone can hold a spot for anyone else until about 4:30. I arrived at 3:50, but as I’ve already lamented, this was a wee bit too late. Had I gotten there at 3:45, I’m sure I would have gotten in.
• If it’s warm day, I’d probably show up a little before 3:30. If you’re on early side, you’ll wait on 11th, but the later folks wait around the corner on 52nd. It’s always less fun to wait for stuff around a corner.
• At 4:00 or so, someone explains that you absolutely cannot use a camera during the taping, and that you’ll have to go through a metal detector. As such, I would try to bring as little as possible to the event. (They also let you know that you’ll be able to use the bathroom once you get inside.)
• TV studios are kept cold, so stay sharp and dress appropriately! Also 11th Ave and 52nd street, which is right by the river, would be a very cold place to wait in line when it’s chilly out.

So there you have it. Jessica and I also have some tickets reserved for the Colbert Report, but they are for midwinter, so I’m less excited about all the standing around outside.

In other news, I’ve supplemented my inability to actually go out and do things by joining facebook and twitter. More on that later, but for now, here’s a vaguely relevant blog post I wrote a long time ago.

As expected, NYC’s top skaters weren’t out at 11:30 on a Sunday (they were probably all getting brunch in Chelsea before heading over). Only four young kids were rolling around along with a few aspiring skaters our age. Taking age into account, I was definitively the worst person there. I did manage to go up and down various curved surfaces before succumbing to the heat. (Skating tip: when trying to convince your friend to leave a skate park, simply wait until they’ve just injured themselves rolling into the halfpipe)

Our second stop was also along the west side highway, some steps we used to skate near back in the day. We both remembered the area being a dingy all hours hang out for gay partiers. It’s since been overrun by some park littered with women sunbathing in bikinis. The ambiance just wasn’t the same, so we sat on the grass for a bit and only got in about two minutes of skating. After leaving we experienced the most jarring departure from our past: we got in a taxi and met our girlfriends for lunch.