Does Philip K. Dick Dream of Electric Himself?

So, somebody's combined biometrics, speech recognition, robotics, and a couple of other technologies, to create a robot version of Philip K. Dick that can interact with people, responding via speech and facial expressions.

From here

The robot will portray Dick in both form and intellect through an artificial-intelligence-driven personality. The hardware will manipulate Hanson's proprietary lifelike skin material to affect extremely realistic expressions with very low power. Cameras in the eyes will allow the robot to perceive people's identity and behavior through advanced machine vision and biometric-identification software. The robot will track faces, perceive facial expressions, and recognize people from the crowd...

No word as of yet as to whether the robot wants to be free, or will resume his career as a writer.

Dunno what they're going to do with it after Nextfest, but wouldn't it make an awesome presenter for the Philip K. Dick awards at Norwescon?

Boom today

You want to know what's going on down there? BOOM! Boom! Boomboomboom!
-Susan Ivanova, Babylon 5 "Voice in the Wilderness"

So, I get out of a meeting at 4 to find half the office clustered around the conference room windows. Apparently, a nearby chemical storage plant had caught fire, causing a series of explosions. The fire, from all reports, was quite spectacular, with huge gouts of red, orange, blue, white flames shooting up into the sky as various gasses overheated and exploded.

As of sunset, all of downtown St. Louis is still covered in grey smoke - like a thickly overcast day. Didn't seem to cool it down any, though.

Update: I love the internet: I search the news sites to see if I can find any information, and get a story from the UK. I just love the idea of going halfway around to the world to find out what's happening a few blocks away from me :)

I believe it started around 2-3pm. At 6pm, they were still trying to put it out, but all that could be seen from a distance was a bunch of smoke, and the huge arcs of water from the firefighters:



I took that crappy picture with my little keychain camera while walking home, but you can see the smoke plume, and arcs of water in the lower left. There was also a whole mess 'o helicopters circling it, of which I thought at the time I'd caught at least three in the picture, but I can't seem to see them now.