Shut up already.

Lucky us Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi gave a fairly short speech today. At a little over 95 minutes the "Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialists Peoples Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" (one of his actual titles, he has a few) was hours off the records for real long UN speeches. Too bad they didn't let him pitch his tent in the park across the street (really), or he might have been well rested and talked longer and maybe, just maybe, he might have made some sense. But hey, he is the force behind the Libyan National telescope project.

The UN's inclusivity has given equal time at the same podium to nut bars, dictators and down right losers. Sometimes you just gotta piss some people off to keep your street credibility.

Speeches that easily eclipsed this speech were: India's V. K. Krishna Menon, the holder of the trophy with his killer 7 hours, 48 minutes. It was January 23, 1957 when he tore into Pakistan for what is for most people a whole day's work time.

And it's nearly the anniversary of Fidel Castro's September 26, 1960 thumper. He gave it a good run clocking in at 4 hours 29 minutes.

Though not at the UN, Hugo Chavez went on for over 8 hours on some Venezuelan talk show. Jesus.

Beep.

So this is weird. I was combing the Inet looking for likely story ideas when I came across this CBC article about a Georgia Tech professor who looked at the attraction people have for vacuum cleaners. Ok, ok. The little Robot vacs called Roombas. I won't go on about it here because this article is much better written than anything I could come up with. Here's the link: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/10/02/roomba-study.html

But I got going on about it and had to find out what some of the first robots were like. Once again I'm off on another tangent. I'll be back to musical instruments soon.

Ibn Ismail ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, we'll call him Al-Jazari, made several robots, or automata, around the year 1200. Power for the machines was limited to clockwork mechanisms, water flow (from one vessel to another) or animal power. Electrical power was a few years away. One real big example of his early work is the elephant clock. Its actually a water clock placed on top of a real big wooden elephant. The body of the beast hides the mechanism and water. The top part is the exciting bit.

Later on he built the most robotic (at least to our idea of what a modern robot should be)of his mechanical inventions. These were true humaniod automata. And they were programmable. A camshaft ran through the device, and depending on where the bumps, or pegs were placed on the shaft, the robots, in this case a band of musicians, would alter what they "played". Mainly it was drums or cymbals that were struck. You essesntially got a different group of noises, but still, it was controllable.