This is very groovy!  Theo Jansen designs walking machines with sensors and binary brains out of electrical tubing, hoses, and plastic bottles, all powered by the wind.

It’s like someone put legs on the captain’s chair from the starship Enterprise.

Click the picture for YouTube footage

Why do I have a feeling that Andy Warhol would have loved this thing?

You’re gawking at the the Hubo FX-1 by Hubo Lab (the Humanoid Robot Research Center). It’s, um, well … silly looking, so much so that this is my second attempt to properly document it here.

If you can’t get to YouTube, the video depicts someone sitting in the chair as the machine takes slow baby steps across a room.

Definitely a work-in-progress. I’d hate to be sitting in it when the thing trips and falls on someone’s banana peel.

Stumbled upon via Coolest-Gadgets.com, who in turn found it via Technovelgy…

A project built by UC Berkeley students for class, this gizmo for folding and dispensing toilet paper is made of Legos and scrap metal.

Very clever! The most complex thing I ever built with Legos was a model space ship. Now all they need to do is add a little spray of air freshener at the end, and the project would be complete.

You just have to love innovation, though this is not something you’ll find hitting the mass market anytime soon.

Tired of having to get up to get a beer in the middle of an important sporting event on TV? Well, a very clever engineer named John W. Cornwell devised a refrigerator that brings it to you … via special air delivery, no less.

Inside, a can is brought up and out of the fridge by an elevator, where it’s then transferred into the business end of a catapult. The catapult swivels around and tosses with amazing accuracy to where ever you’ve aimed it.

Don’t take my word for it, watch the video.

This groovy piece of homemade hardware is controlled by a car’s remote. Pressing the “unlock” button starts the catapult and it spins around until you press unlock again. Press “lock” and the beer is in the air.

If you think about it, the gizmo not only makes it effortless to get a beer, it also limits how many you can have. When you’ve passed the point of drunkenness where you can no longer operate it properly, or lack the eye-hand coordination to catch the flying can, the beer hits you in the face, knocking you out, and thus preventing you from imbibing further.

The only thing I’d do differently is fill it with a different type of beer.