Status-Q

An exceedingly impressive video from Boston Dynamics. Well worth a look.

Dashed clever, these robotics chaps.

Many thanks to Jason Young for the link.

Dinner tonight at the splendidly-named Bar Q. It does Asian-style barbecue (and, by the way, comes highly recommended).

The friend who met us there was asking the waitress how business was going (since so many NY restaurants last only a few months). She said it was good, but the pattern of business changed in the summer because so many people go away for weekends, and she came up, completely seriously, with what I thought was a wonderfully New-York phrase. She said that

Wednesday/Thursday is the new Friday/Saturday

Well, after our flight from Detroit to New York was cancelled twice in a row and delayed for an uncertain period on our third attempt, we decided that 36 hours of delay was quite enough for a 2 hour flight and we should take our destiny into our own hands.

So we’re driving. This comes to you from a thoroughly uninspiring Best Western in Youngstown, Ohio, where we’ve broken our journey. Normally I quite enjoy long cross-country drives in the States, as long as I have plenty of time to stop and explore the back-roads. This time, however, we need to see Rose’s publishers before the flight home, so I think we’ll hit the highway again tomorrow for 7 hours or so on the cruise control…

Update: Well, we got to New York in the end, and, even including a reasonable night’s sleep and meals, we still managed to travel an average of 28 miles per hour for the last 24 hours!

I was out with my brother-in-law a couple of days ago, when his mobile phone beeped. He looked at it and handed it to me.

“It says I have a ‘text message’. What’s that? And how do I read it?”