Robot news.

1. "The Rise of the Robots Has an Upside." Adapt!

2. "British troops are using... state-of-the-art handheld tiny surveillance helicopters, which relay reliable full motion video and still images back to the devices' handlers...." Close your windows!

IN THE COMMENTS: Chef Mojo said:

3. Kia "Respect The Tech" Super Bowl commercial.

"A minor war has broken out south of Qunfudah in the village of Kiad where large groups of hungry baboons from nearby valleys are attacking residences..."

"Hussein Al-Barakati, a resident of Kiad, said that he feared for his mother’s safety as she lives alone near the valley...."

Adel Medini, from the town of Helli, has his own take on the recent scourge of baboons: “It’s a daily game of hide and seek. The baboons are targeting empty houses and are well aware of what they are doing. The assault on the village is not random, as some believe. They proceed according to studied plans. That’s why their attacks do not fail. For example, imagine a resident who is absent from their home for a period of time. Even though it’s just one day, he is surprised to return to find his home in disarray. Some people in this situation thought that thieves had broken into and ransacked their houses … The problem is that the village’s houses are old and non-roofed, and our daily guest is hungry.”

Salem Al-Barakati said that the main reason that the baboons are difficult to stymie is because of their high intelligence. They easily match wits with those out to drive them away.

Via Walter Russell Mead:

It’s not just in Saudi Arabia that baboons see human beings as a prey animal. At the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, there is a parking lot for tourists coming to see the beautiful wild landscape where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. Baboons lurk on the edge of the parking lot, watching tourists come and go. They look for car doors that aren’t locked, windows that are left opened, absent-minded tourists carrying food....

[T]he baboons in that parking lot... clearly felt only contempt for their squishy, soft, clawless and short toothed cousins. You could see it in their hard and glittering eyes.

They easily match wits....

The challenge of running a blog comments section.

Instapundit writes:

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD GETS RID OF COMMENTS ON HIS BLOG: “To make the comments section work in its present form we would have to edit and curate much more aggressively than we do now and in our current judgment the effort needed to do that is better spent improving other features of the blog.”

I toy with the idea of opening comments now and then, but the above has always been my feeling, too.

Mead announces the end of comments effective immediately. No comments on the end of comments. I think he should have had one more comments thread on that post. The previous post, the last post with comments, is saying that the blog hit a new traffic record. That got 11 comments. 11 comments! Is it really that hard to "edit and curate"?

I like Instapundit as it is, without comments, mostly because it's all about sending people to other blogs, so all the other blogs stand in for comments. But if you're not a blog that's about linking to a lot of other people, it feels like there ought to be comments. Maybe it's just because that's what I'm used to.  I don't know. I love the comments section around here.