In 2016, the educated expectation was that it would take approximately a decade before Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot would be able to perform a backflip. This expectation was based on a loose timeline determined by the results of testing around the balance and performance of earlier prototypes. Boston Dynamics achieved this goal in 2017 In 2017 Boston Dynamic released a video of their Atlas robot performing the backflip. There’s something a little unnerving in the viewing, perhaps it’s the stark warehouse setting or, and more likely, the many years of cinema conditioning that has shown us the worst possible outcome of increasingly mobile robot armies. However, in no way does this deter from t
Why I’m supporting Derek O’ Kelly in his quest to bring Winning Minds Movement to the masses: I was sitting in my office one Saturday morning and I received the most terrifying call, the likes of which I hope I never receive again. My friend had gone missing. This call was especially disturbing because for the previous weeks we had spent countless hours discussing a growing mental health issue, and several afternoons sitting in various doctors’ offices trying to arrange appointments to discuss declining mental health and medication problems. This was an ongoing problem, so our concerns were real. The culmination of this call was a frantic search that eventually led to a hospital. We’d been a
I’ve just had lunch with the guy who invented Baileys, and it was a masterclass. ‘But that was forty years ago Karl.’ Some months back I was due to give a talk at an Innovation event in Cong, co. Mayo. I was told with a degree of ceremony, David Gluckman would speaking at the event. Great, I thought, who’s David Gluckman? Well, it turned out I missed David’s talk but throughout the event, people kept asking me had I ‘heard David’s talk,’ and ‘wasn’t it amazing.’ I was still wondering, ‘who’s David Gluckman?’ Eventually I found out, David Gluckman is the guy who invented Bailey’s. He’s also the guy who has written, ‘That Shit Will Never Sell,’ which to my mind is the greater achievement of th
