A few days ago, Brown Robotics made headlines around the world for announcing their achieving the long fantasized goal of creating robots that could interact with humans. It’s not what you think. The robot, based off of iRobot’s PackBot model, can respond to basic gestures that signal for the robot to “follow”, “halt”, “wait”, and “door breach”. Throw out your Ridley Scott fantasies and Wall-E dreams because as the video confirms, the manifestation of this scientific breakthrough is more boring than it sounds.

Now, to imagine what the robot could someday do. The paradox of robot invasions at Brown has been a long time coming. (Does the hippie Brown image and the robot warrior thing seem more like paradox or perfection?) Since this particular project received funding from the military and exhibits apparently military-like actions—note the same “halt” gesture seen in Saving Private Ryan—it’s not long before it gets cannon arms. This prediction is definitely supported by the fact that the robot does not yet have arms, and it’s creepy that way.

Or maybe the new robot can take care of awkward social lives on Ivy League campuses.  Read this:

“We want to foster natural human-robot collaboration in the long term and the kind of interactions that you can get between people,” said Loper, who was responsible for creating the gesture-recognition component. “That a person could interact with a robot in the same way that a person can interact with a person.”

Yes, you do sir. And ladies, if you’re not busy this weekend, Mr. Loper is an idea man. See some pictures of our favorite robots that are much cooler than Brown’s after the jump.

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This is dedicated to the robot person from the previous post, obvi.

But yeah — It just. Keeps. Giving. We will continue to write about the 7/29/07 New York Times (Magazine) article-by-image-by-article until it’s exhausted. And I want to keep this brief, because I’ve had enough with nerds for the day, but there was yet another relevant article in this issue of the Magazine. It’s called “Who’s a Nerd, Anyway?” and no, it’s different from the robot cover story. I could write a whole post on it… or I could just let you chew this one over:

By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white.

Sleep well!

–JIM NEWELL

You may recall from Jacob Savage’s “Drinking on Facebook 101,” one of my favorite posts evarr, how ’11s across the League are creating groups to demonstrate their mad drinking skillz, which sometimes reach five Smirnoff Ices in a single night. The standard bearer for this bacchanalian revelry was the Columbia group “Screw the U – Columbia ‘11 works hard but parties harder!!” That’s right, two exclamation points, bitch. 

Given the First Rule of Facebook Groups — for every eccentric group there is an equal and opposite eccentric group — there was no way these chug-a-lugs would exist in a vacuum. With that, allow me to introduce “Columbia ‘11 Works Hard, Stays Indoors, And Does Not Party At All.”

I don’t feel like a jerk describing them as geeks, because they’d be the first to admit it. And while their philistine adversaries have some dizzyingly funny discussion board topics, like “Mary Jane” and “The thin line between drunk and tipsy,” these more traditional Columbia types have “Orientation Iliad Discussion Party” and “Attracted to Dorkiness.”

After the jump, riveting tales of supergalactic love and temperance.

But first, as funny as these groups are, I’m a little worried about the Columbia ’11s. It’s still a month or so before their college experience starts, and many have already cordoned themselves into one-dimensional identities. Isn’t it odd that some of the country’s brightest kids have self-dichotomized — at the college level, no less — into bingers vs. squares? I thought the point of college was discovering nuances and not having to choose between the Screech or A.C. Slater camps. We should emulate Zack Morris: a friend to all of earth’s creatures, a lover of Kelly Kapowski.

Meh. Nerd sex, after the jump. 

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Check out Brown’s frightening, dystopian new homepage. It’s like taking a college tour guided by Philip K. Dick. Even the friendly “Come on in” that appears when we mouse over the “Admissions” tab doesn’t convince us we’re not gonna get a robotic rectal probe right after our interview.