Word: toying
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Even so, by the age of five the classical holiday commercials depicting Santa crawling down a chimney with a sack full of toys began to grate on my developing rationality. I enumerated a number of problems with the "Santa Hypothesis" ordered by degree of disquietude created: 1) The Logistical Problem: Too many houses existed to visit them all in one night. Counter-argument: Santa might have been able to slowdown or stop time. 2) The Production Problem: The availability of raw materials at the North Pole seemed fairly limited. Also, Santa Inc. did not seem like a viable business, what...
...Breazeal, Kismet still has a lot to learn. Breazeal is working on helping the computer with some simple skills that human babies are hardwired for. She wants Kismet to be able to use the information it learns. One day, she hopes, when Kismet is told the name of a toy, it will later be able to ask for it by name. "Through more interactions, Kismet could learn, 'When I'm in this state, I can take this action that leads to a person's taking this behavior and getting my needs satiated,'" Breazeal says. She also wants Kismet...
...idea for the Super Soaker. He dubbed his creation a "pneumatic water gun" and made his first prototype from PVC pipe, a plastic Coke bottle and Plexiglas. Then he turned loose his six-year-old daughter Aneka on the neighborhood. Kids and adults alike went nuts over the toy...
...nine years Johnson hawked the water gun to toymakers. It was going to cost $200,000 to produce 1,000 guns. Finally, at a toy fair in New York City, he was introduced to Al Davis, now the executive vice president at Larimi Corp. "I turned around, and there was the saddest guy I'd ever seen," remembers Davis. "He'd been trying to find somebody who was interested in it. He told me that if we turned him down, he was going to give...
Both Gold and Card have this aim in mind, but there the similarities end. Gold is deeply tanned, ponytailed and fast talking, with a background in experimental music and toy design. His group has spent the past couple of years dreaming up utterly outlandish text-display inventions like Speeder Reader. There's the Tilty Table, a vast and thin computer screen on shock absorbers that you tilt in any direction to scroll through a document that would in real life be 30 ft. across; Listen Reader, which uses tiny embedded computer chips to produce different ambient sounds on each page...