Thank you, Tara Carreon, wife of (possibly) the most hated man on the internet/local attorney Charles Carreon, for proving the most disliked comment since we added the thumbs up/down mechanism and for being the first person this month to call for my firing in the comment section. I had the 10th in the pool, so I'm bummed.

Of all things, I'm meeting up with Charles Carreon himself next week, so more to come on that front.

Great, another day, another Japanese robot designed with a new skill in mind. Now, the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory has built a robotic hand that wins every single game of Rock, Scissors, Paper. Thankfully, the robot isn't capable of reading minds (yet), but instead is programmed to look for minute changes in the human hand to quickly react with the winning gesture. While I'm not sure exactly how this will help dominate the human race in the near future, we won't be able to trick the robots with Rock, Scissors, Paper at very least. One fewer tool at our disposal, I guess.

[Telegraph]

You might remember that Facebook tried to convince everyone a few months ago that we really wanted @facebook.com email addresses, because really I say to myself that I could use another way for people to contact me that I have to think about checking every five minutes - wait, that's not something I've ever said, but thanks anyway, Zuckerberg.

Anyhow, over the weekend, our Facebook overlords apparently decided that whatever email address you might have set up to have people contact you is somehow inferior to the one they would prefer you use, so they hid your addresses behind theirs. Awesome, right?

If you'd like to restore order to your contact info, follow these simple instructions from Gizmodo:

Luckily, it's easy to fix this foolish move. Go to your Timeline. Click about, under your contact info. Scroll down to "Contact Info" and hit edit. Switch all of the crossed out circle symbols to a full circle for each inbox you want visible on your profile. If you don't want @facebook.com to show up, switch it from a full circle ("Shown on Timeline") to crossed out ("Hidden from Timeline"). This is also a good opportunity to check your privacy settings and make sure your various inboxes are visible only to friendlies. Hit save.

Despite their rampant overuse during the early days of the visual web, the internet is a far better place these days because of the simple genius of the GIF, invented 25 years ago today:

The modern-day GIF was introduced to the world 25 years ago today by Steve Wilhite as a more versatile alternative to the JPEG, according to Alexander “Sandy” Trevor, the former chief technical officer of CompuServe.

“If you want lossless, compressed graphics, there is nothing better than GIF,” Trevor told the Daily Dot. “Yes, JPEG is better for photos, but you can tolerate loss in photos. And PNG has some benefits, but for most applications it is not worth the additional implementation hassle.”

As you may know, I have tried, largely unsuccessfully, to use my platform here at the Tucson Weekly to warn the world of our future enslavement by a self-sufficient horde of robots, possibly involving KVOA's SKYNET somehow.

However, all I can do is sound a warning. I lack the practical robot defeating knowledge that will help our human race survive. Thankfully, author Daniel H. Wilson and Epipheo have teamed up to create a helpful animated video that might be of some assistance.

[Shortformblog]

• Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
• No clue what this photo has to do with anything, but I thought it was funny, at least.

I'm stunned that someone spent time and money coming up with an index for Facebook addiction - not because Facebook can't be a problem, but because the signs see a little obvious - but the University of Bergen came up with a scale, which consists of giving a score to each of these six attributes from 1 (very rarely) to 5 (very often):

You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or plan use of Facebook
You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more
You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems
You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success
You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook
You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies.

If you score four or more of those with a four or five, it might be time to turn the computer off.

From the same creative firm that created the Fall Out Boy version of "Oregon Trail", there's now a Flash-based game themed around the late 80's/early 90's sitcom Perfect Strangers, in which you play as Balki, chasing a dream by collecting stars as the show's theme plays. Yes, this is actually something that exists.

A special bonus, you can read through the "dreams" people have entered to "chase" which range from the desire to lose forty pounds to an aspiration to hunt and kill a unicorn.

Yesterday, commenter Bob Cap asked:

Whats going on with the Japanese sex robots......functional yet???

While I don't have any information about Japanese robots specifically, The Week has an article online covering the future world of robotic prostitutes:

What are the benefits of robotic prostitutes?
Beyond being tireless, "commercial sex robots would be free of disease and would reduce the trafficking of real people," write the study's authors, Michelle Mars and Ian Yeoman at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Human trafficking continues to plague every region of the globe, with conservative estimates putting the victim count at 2.5 million, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

[...]

What would future sex robots be like?
Mars and Yeoman envision "next-generation robots with human-like skin," offering intimate services like lap-dances and intercourse. The bots would be made with "bacteria resistant fiber that could be flushed for human fluids between uses," keeping them disease-free.

I'll tell you, nothing sounds sexier that a tireless robot made of flushable bacteria resistant fiber. However, the upside is that I'm relatively sure the human race will find a way to give robots sexually transmitted diseases somehow, which might slow their inevitable dominance over the planet.

I believe I'm on the record regarding my prediction of our future as slaves of a hyper-intelligent class of robots , so, for me, even seemingly positive advances in robotic technology are a harbinger of our forthcoming doom, but I guess if you're interested in a machine bringing you the soda you asked for, enjoy it while it lasts.

Here's a cool video from the research team at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics department (the Search-based Planning Laboratory), in which a robot bartender (the PR2 dual-arm mobile robot) is demonstrated. After a human makes a drink and snack selection, the robot can determine the proper area of where the items are located, as well as how far its arm is so it can properly grab the snack and drink choice.

You should read the entire comic, but the above frame from The Oatmeal should probably be everyone's guide to using the internet.