Chris Lintott’s Universe

I promise a post about NASA’s announcement will follow when I have some time and am awake. In the meantime, I’m getting lots of emails about this story; a robot conducting an orchestra is being billed as a great breakthrough.

Except the robot isn’t conducting the orchestra. It’s copied a series of movements from someone who knew what they were doing, and has no ability to react to the sound being produced. Given worlds enough and time (two things I’m short of, right now) I could learn to copy a decent conductor, so please could somebody explain why this is impressive.

I promise a post about NASA’s announcement will follow when I have some time and am awake. In the meantime, I’m getting lots of emails about this story; a robot conducting an orchestra is being billed as a great breakthrough.

Except the robot isn’t conducting the orchestra. It’s copied a series of movements from someone who knew what they were doing, and has no ability to react to the sound being produced. Given worlds enough and time (two things I’m short of, right now) I could learn to copy a decent conductor, so please could somebody explain why this is impressive.

At 6pm UK time today, NASA are announcing what they bill as “the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years. This finding was made by combining data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with ground-based observations.” I’ll be blogging the press conference live…

Update: I’ve been running late all day. You can find the answer on Phil’s blog here and I’ll post my thoughts later. Sorry.