Robot Hall of Fame

February 20, 2011 – It’s been almost 20 years since the death of Isaac Asimov, and I still don’t have a robot butler. I mean, sure, the Japanese are doing freaky things with human analogues, Watson was on Jeopardy last week, and throw-away Happy Meal toys are light years ahead of my old Teddy Ruxpin, but I still don’t have a robot butler. If I did, I’d treat it like family, and we’d probably solve crimes together.

So until we can create meaningful relationships with artificially derived intelligences dressed in waistcoats and kravats, we’ve at least always got movies and television to satiate our desire for robots in our lives. I mean, I assume we all share that desire, at least. I’m not saying that, instead of counting sheep, you named famous robots to lull yourself to sleep like I did when I was a kid, but I am under the impression that it’s one of those self-evident truths that the U.S. Declaration of Independence is always declaring. You know, all men are created equal. All men have certain inalienable rights. All men dig robots. It’s that third one that always trips up those Middle Eastern countries.

That’s why I’m Caramel Cream Pepsi Jazzed that there exists on this disgustingly biological mud ball of ours a shiny, metallic Robot Hall of Fame. In fact, I’m not even sure I’m up to the task of writing about such a cool topic. Still (and my apologies), in 2003, the School of Computer Science at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, established the Robot Hall of Fame to “honor” both fictional and actual robots, from the real-world Roomba to the much-cooler fake-world Lt. Cmdr. Data.

Unfortunately, the Robot Hall of Fame has more Robot and Fame than Hall to it, since it’s mostly virtual, with not much more than a sparse website and a few press releases staking claim to the idea. Hopefully, some rich and philanthropic visionary will one day eschew the boring tropes of human welfare and give the Robot Hall of Fame its own futuristic-looking building and its own generous budget to stuff that futuristic-looking building full of robots. If I ever get that wealthy, and if I have any money left over from purchasing the Elephant Man’s bones, then I’m on it.

Actually, the Robot Hall of Fame does have a small physical presence, and a pretty cool one at that. It’s just that, like this article, it’s not quite up to the awesomeness intrinsic in the idea of a Robot Hall of Fame. Nevertheless, close to awesome is still pretty awesome [Highlight. Copy. Open “Potential Epitaphs” Word doc. Paste. Save.].

You can find the physical portion of the Robot Hall of Fame just across the Ohio-Allegheny River junction from the downtown area of Pittsburgh in the four-floor Carnegie Science Museum. Like too many modern science centers, the building is more Beakman’s World than NOVA, being mostly filled with interactive children’s exhibits. They do have a pretty cool tourable submarine that is parked out behind it in the river and is included with the admission cost, though.

However, half of the second floor is dedicated to RoboWorld, a permanent exhibit on robotics. There you can see small, wheeled robots navigate an obstacle course, watch a giant robot arm shoot a basketball with flawless precision, and other probably cool things that I didn’t pay much attention to because...

In a row of alcoves along one wall of this exhibit stood three-dimensional reproductions of some of science fiction’s most famous movie and television robots, all standing there exactly like I imagine robots do when awaiting orders from their master. With the exception of maybe Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), they all seemed more-or-less full-scale.

And it was a party. In addition to Gort, there was Maria from Metropolis ( 1927), Robby the Robot, who actually has a film resume larger than most SAG members but who is most known from its role in Forbidden Planet (1956), Dewey from Silent Runnings (1972), HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), B-9 from the television series Lost in Space (1965-1968), and C-3PO and R2-D2 from the long-running soap opera Days of Our Lives (1965-present).

The facsimiles were extremely detailed, with everything from C-3PO’s bare midriff to HAL’s blue WordPerfect text screen and glowing orange eye painstakingly reproduced. They were also wired so that if the robot had light-up bits (such as Gort’s eye slit or B-9’s chest panel), they were lighted appropriately.

Each robot also had a placard that featured their name, the years of their respective roles, and a short generic bit of text about them. I say generic, but I did actually learn something from the Dewey placard. Turns out, the Huey, Dewey, and Louie robots from Silent Running were costumes worn by double amputees because they were the only ones who could fit in the squat shapes of the robot design. That’s now my permanent factoid for any awkward conversation lull that needs a “Did you know…” kick in the pants.

Not that it really matters when you’ve got a large Robby the Robot to stare at, but there was also a small display of vintage robot toys and an interesting interactive 15-foot-long electronic board that gave a genealogy of robots in human culture. In addition, the exhibit included some sort of cartridge-based machine for making virtual postcards themed according to the robot of your choice that you could then email to yourself as a souvenir, but some 10-year-old boy was hogging it and wouldn’t accept my dares to go tell HAL that the mission directives sucked or Gort how cool it was that the planet had enough nuclear bombs to not be a planet anymore.

And that’s pretty much it for the Robot Hall of Fame to date. You come in, walk past eight robots like a drill sergeant inspecting his troops, and then you fight ten-year-olds to email yourself a Maria-themed virtual postcard. One day I hope it’ll be a place where you need to take a week off work and stand in line for hours to get in, but until then it’s still a thrill-inducing sight for anybody who has ever tried to create a robot out of tin foil, soda cans, and cardboard shipping boxes. No, that statement doesn’t need a “when they were a kid.” Why would you say that?

And with this posted, it’s nap time for me. IG-88…Mechagodzilla…Johnny 5…Marvin the Paranoid Android…that scary chick from Superman III…Muffit...David Bowie…Dot Matrix…the carnival robot from the original Scooby Doo series…Bishop…the Iron Giant…Rosie the Maid…RoboCop…Small Wonder…Bubo the Owl…every Gobot…the bigfoot from that Six Million Dollar Man episode…Buffybot…Zebtron from The Secret City*…all those bikini girls that Dr. Goldfoot made…Twiki…Ultron…those MST3K puppets…Brainiac…Mr. Roboto…

*Wins the Obscure Award. Here, let me save you some Googling.

Boston Museum of Science

February 12, 2011 - Even though oddity is my island here at O.T.I.S., regular readers know that I’ll sometimes pretend that mainstream things are odd just to give me an excuse to write about them. Also, that I generally define oddity as anything that catches my eye (no matter how hard I throw it). Truth is, even the most boring, mundane, jejune, bland thing in the world is strange if you stand on your head and look at it, and that’s generally the position I assume when I write.

Science museums are a good example of this, not that they are any of those above-written pejoratives, but they are decidedly mainstream. That said, some of them can get kind of boring if they’re too geared toward “interactive children’s exhibits,” which is just generally a phrase that creeps me out thanks to the juxtaposition of the last two words. These museums are excellent place to see amazing traveling exhibits, though, such as this one on Mythic Creatures or this one on the Science of Aliens.

However, the Boston Museum of Science has some pretty cool stuff on permanent display, including a range of large-animal taxidermy, a giant room-dominating Van de Graaff generator (which for some reason we didn’t take a picture of), and Anakin Skywalker’s Naboo Starfighter (which I only find cool because I way dig movie props, even from movies I hate). And all that in addition to exhibits on space exploration and dinosaurs, the cool kids of the science disciplines peer group.

The museum features a butterfly garden.

This live possum specimen that they trotted out for a
nature demonstration that we happened to catch.

Grave Creek Mound

February 8, 2011 – Usually, you name your town cemetery after your town. So if you live in the town of Perfection, then your main cemetery is Perfection Cemetery (and you should be watching out for graboids). In Moundsville, West Virginia, they did the opposite, and named the town after the cemetery. Sort of.

In this case, the “Mound” in Moundsville refers to Grave Creek Mound, the largest Native American burial mound in the entire United States, which apparently has way more burial mounds than I thought. In fact, looking around online, it seems as if parts of the country are completely goitery with them, like the land was frozen mid-boil or something.

However, even if Grave Creek Mound were the only hump of dead people in the country, it would still be impressive. At 69 feet tall, 295 feet wide at its base, and with a circumference of...hold on...doing the math...times pi...926 feet, Grave Creek Mound is a pile of dirt like an iceberg is a chunk of ice. Meaning that it is exactly that, but to state such just makes us jerks.

The grave mound was built by the Adena, a Native American people who lived thousands of years ago in a hunk of now-states that cover an annoyingly cross-regional area south of the Great Lakes. We know very little about Adena culture other than they liked to build mounds and were the first of a handful of Native American cultures that did so. In fact, like Remington Steele, we don’t even know their real name.

They were dubbed after the estate of the Ohio governor upon whose property the first Adena mound was excavated, a naming practice that could have gone horribly awry had it been on the property of somebody like, say, Michael Jackson. History is full of “This close to silly.” Just kidding. The Neverland peoples would be an awesome name. For anything.

The Grave Creek specimen is figured to be about 2,000 years old and was discovered by whitey in 1770. The artificial hill remained intact for another 70 years before a couple of amateur archeologists (i.e., looters), dug into it and rifled through all the bones and artifacts inside and then charged admission for people to come see their awesome handiwork. All told, three complete skeletons were found inside and enough beads, trinkets, and implements to buy three Manhattan islands.

The state of West Virginia, which hadn’t been embarrassed enough by Virginia to become its own state at the time of either the discovery or the plundering of the mound, eventually got their wild, wonderful hands on this 60,000-ton pile of earth in 1909. Now it’s a park. Because that’s what states do when they’re not naming state vegetables, animals, minerals, and television shows. They make parks.

Grave Creek Mound is located in the center of the town that was named for it, on Jefferson Avenue, right across from the now defunct and always spooky West Virginia State Penitentiary. It’s free to visit and features a long set of stone steps that wraps around the grass- and tree-covered mound and leads to a flattened top surrounded by a one-foot-tall stone fence. In the center of the hilltop is a short, four-sided obelisk with the cardinal points engraved into its flanks. While we were bear-went-over-the-mountain-ing there, a couple was perched on the low wall eating lunch. I’m just imagining their text message conversation prior:

“Wanna lunch?”

“Ok. Where?”

“Let’s grab Subway & eat on burial mound.”

“Awesome idea. ;)”

“I hate emoticons.”

Actually that last line was me. It does make me wonder if Grave Creek Mound is the town make-out spot, though.

Adjacent to the mound is the Delf Norona Museum and Grave Creek Mound Archeological Complex, which is also free and showcases various Adena artifacts, a large pre-Columbian model of the area, and archaeological facilities that you can view through an observation window.

As cool as an ancient Native American burial mound is, there’s really not much more that I have to say about it. Which is fine, but does make me wonder how much I’ll have to say when I see my first iceberg. Hopefully more than, “Look out!”

Libby Museum

February 3, 2011 – Dr. Henry Libby was a dentist sometime during the late 19th and early 20th centuries who overcompensated for having his hands wrist-deep in people's disgusting mouths for hours every day by slowly amassing an impressive and varied collection of natural and anthropological artifacts and oddities, mostly from the New England region, that went on to become the Libby Museum, a seasonally open, one-room collection in a small, humble, dedicated building on the pleasant shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in the vacation town of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire.

Sorry. At some point I stopped caring about this entry in general and just concentrated on stuffing as much as I could into that single sentence. All I really should have written is that this small, 100-year-old museum is full of cool stuff like this:

Yup, mummy hands. Hello new catch phrase.