Word: robotical
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...regrettable maxim of the '80s is that frivolity has become the mother of invention. The latest evidence: Andy Warhol, 51, the lifeless doyen of Pop art, is being immortalized as a lifelike robot. The copy is the work of Alvaro Villa, 42, a onetime Disney animator, who claims that the computerized dummy will be barely distinguishable from the real thing. Villa will bless A2W2 with preprogrammed speech and 54 separate body movements. Upon completion, the $400,000 robot will hit the road as the star of a $1.25 million multimedia road show called Andy Warhol's Overexposed...
...Italian cheese, Taos Indian drums, underwater cameras, solid-fuel rockets, night-vision goggles, woks, socks, building blocks, coffee roasters, toasters, coasters, cashmere sweaters, G strings, food processors, wine vinegar, wine racks and wine-flavored toothpaste, pineapple peelers, electronic potato parers, pear trees, frozen pheasants, silver stirrups, golden everything, robot chess partners, posters, potholders, the world's plumpest peanuts, jelly beans, ice cream machines, pushbutton card shufflers, 30 types of angel fish, fat-farm vacations, exquisite tools, 2,250-ft. balls of twine, doormats, decanters and dark glasses for dogs...
...inner solar system, comets were widely viewed as omens of disaster. Astronomers now look upon them as primordial chunks of matter that offer clues to the solar system's formation. The budget-conscious U.S. has bowed out of the race to intercept Halley's comet with a robot spacecraft, thus leaving the field to the Soviets, Western Europeans and Japanese. But NASA plans a relatively cheap ($2 million) alternative: diverting an unmanned ship already in orbit for an inspection of a comet called Giacobini-Zinner, which will appear a few months ahead of its famous...
...want to see such parallels sensitively drawn, a fine modern interpretation of The Tempest does exist in the 1956 science-fiction thriller Forbidden Planet, with Walker Pidgeon as a Phillip-like character and Robbie the Robot as his Kal-bonos. Catch it on a Saturday afternoon double creature feature. At least it'll cost you less than Mazursky's offering...
Gerrit Nijland, a professor of industrial robotics at Berenschot Management Training Center in The Netherlands, has just concluded a study of the acceptance of the automatons in his country, where 70 firms currently use robots. He found that the most common form of sabotage was to slow down the machines by feeding them parts in the wrong order, with the hope that management would be disappointed in robot performance. In other cases, employees repaired the machines incorrectly, mislaid essential spare parts or put sand into the robots' lubricating oil. In one metal construction plant, production was reduced for more...