A Milestone...

But not a particularly happy one.  Doug S. points out this post showing that just before the end of the year, the U.S. debt “officially” exceeded our GDP in 2011. 

We all knew this was coming, given the velocity of our debt increases.  There's nothing particularly significant about this milestone; it's akin to your car's odometer rolling over 10,000.  But it's a measure of our debt load that's well into danger territory – expressed as a percentage of our GDP (which is as close as I know how to get to expressing our debt in meaningful terms), our debt is now higher than it's been at anytime since the height of WWII.  Unlike that war, this time our debt load is almost entirely (and voluntarily!) self-inflicted – the costs of both our lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is only a small piece of this debt load...

Autonomous Helicopters Build a Building...

Well, sort of. Warren Y. sends along this demonstration of autonomous (i.e., no human controlling them) helicopters (really, quadracopters – much easier to control) building (well, assembling) a building (ok, an attractively designed pile of styrofoam blocks).

Snarking aside, it's really quite an achievement for these roboticists – and it probably is a glimpse of what the future will bring us.  It's perfectly conceivable that within a reasonable amount of time (say, a decade or two) we'll see robots that can actually perform many of the tasks that construction workers do today.  For example, I have no problem imagining a robot that could do a great job at block masonry.