Boston Globe (Jonah Lehrer): “The Truth About Grit.” “Unfortunately, the story of [Newton's] apple is almost certainly false; Voltaire probably made it up. Even if Newton started thinking about gravity in 1666, it took him years of painstaking work before he understood it. He filled entire vellum notebooks with his scribbles and spent weeks recording the exact movements of a pendulum. (It made, on average, 1,512 ticks per hour.) The discovery of gravity, in other words, wasn’t a flash of insight – it required decades of effort, which is one of the reasons Newton didn’t publish his theory until 1687, in the ‘Principia’.”

CNET: “Sunflower Robot Doesn’t Need Sun.” “Japan loves its baroque, impractical machines, with Honda’s zillion-dollar humanoid robot ASIMO being the acme example. Others include the beautiful and haunting robot mannequins designed by Tatsuya Matsui. And let’s not forget that 60-foot-tall Gundam robot erected in a Tokyo park.
These machines are more works of art than tools. That’s also true of Himawari, a robot sunflower now on display at Robosquare in Fukuoka, southwestern Japan.”

New Tang Dynasty Television: “Japan’s Ramen Robot.” “Japan’s obsession with the machines has gone one step further with this creation – a ‘ramen’ noodle robot chef. At the ‘Fua-men’ ramen noodle shop in the central Japanese city of Nagoya, two robotic arms are busy serving their hungry customers, doling out nearly 80 bowls of noodles on a busy day.”