Busy today. Back tomorrow with fresh ephemera. Meanwhile, feel free to rummage through the archives for overlooked nuggets and curios. For heftier posts, see the greatest hits. If you’re really stuck for something to do, clicking the button below can, I’m told, be hugely entertaining.

Zombietime has posted video and transcripts of Christopher Hitchens’ recent debate with the leftwing jihad apologist and author of American Fascists, Chris Hedges. I urge you to watch the brief “Hitchens Highlights” clip below. A second compilation can be found here and a much longer exchange, in 7 parts, can be seen here with photos, transcripts and commentary. Needless to say, Hitchens does a fine job of highlighting the sneery, morally contorted posturing that now defines much of the left.

“The decline – not to say the moral eclipse – of the secular left has just been illustrated on this very platform by someone who makes excuses for suicide murder and tries to trace them to a second-rate sociology… Every member of the 82nd Airborne Division could be a snake-handling congregationalist, for all I know. But these men and women, though you sneer and jeer at them, and snigger when you hear applause and excuses for suicide bombers – and you have to live with the shame of having done that – these people are guarding you while you sleep, whether you know it or not. And they’re also creating space for secularism to emerge, and you better hope that they are successful.”

Someone buy that man a drink. More sneery posturing here. Related: this.

Developed by Japan’s Science and Technology Agency and unveiled last week at Osaka University, CB2 is a 1.3 metre robot toddler. This sexless automaton is fully jointed, equipped with hundreds of optical, auditory and tactile sensors, and, just like human babies, is moved with compressed air. It also has grey silicon skin, which only adds to its appeal. As the videos below demonstrate, CB2 approximates a 1- or 2-year-old toddler and can stand with adult assistance. CB2 can also blink, roll over, wave its legs in the air and make a slightly disturbing “eh” noise.

More of CB2 in action here. (H/T, Lepton.) 

If Jeff Han’s multi-touch interface stroked the appropriate membranes, this could also be of interest. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrates Microsoft’s Photosynth. Hyperlinked image content, spatially mapped and allowing very deep zooms.

More here and here. (H/T: Mat.)

Is it me, or has the amount of junk mail dropped dramatically during the last few days? I mean, by about 80-90%? My inbox is now littered with only a small fraction of the usual solicitations for ways to increase my “volume” or to enlarge some part of my anatomy to superhuman proportions. Looks like this guy was indeed one of the so-called Kings of Spam. Let’s hope that once in prison Mr Soloway winds up as some burly guy’s sexual plaything. Make that several burly guys.

Just imagine the “volume” then.