Who wants expensive robot pets for Christmas?

Several new robots for pets are on the horizon. Creppy videos below for:

• Yume Neko Smile, a robot kitty designed for small Japanese apartments that don't allow live pets. Already for sale!


• Pleo, a baby dinosaur whose creators claim will develop a unique personality. But does it have a mute button?

I'll stick to my puking, pooping, ornery, live cat for now, thanks.

Nerdy Tribute to Madeleine L'Engle

If you didn't know already, the author of "A Wrinkle In Time" and several other classic young adult books, Madeleine L'Engle, died last week. (the NY Times did a nice article.)

With that one book, she managed to have more of a profound impact on my life than any other author in current memory. Although the science was extremely fuzzy in the interests of fiction, I credit this novel with my first exposure to concepts of genetics and higher dimensional physics. Thus began a long happy time reading science fiction and noodling around in avenues of real science.

As for that esoteric fourth dimension, NPR recently produced a segment that does a good job of explaining the basics. I still wish there were better methods for building tesseract models as 3D projections than I can find online...