This week has been pretty interesting. Some popular geek websites in Spain posted about Bots High, which in turn led to a lot of retweets – in Spanish! Here are some of my favorites (correct me if my translation is off):

Bots High: a documentary where robots fight to the death. ROBOTS that FIGHT, enough said. Best. Film. Ever. OMG!

It’s not Real Steel but it’s really good! Bots High: Robots destroying each other

Very yankee entertainment

Official trailer for the documentary Bots High, where students build robot luchadors (fighting robots).

Bots High: Fight of the Robots!

I’d pay to see self-destructing robots…

So some cool news – because of this huge Spanish buzz some people have come forward asking if there’s Spanish subtitles for the film, and when I said there wasn’t they volunteered to translate. So there will be Spanish subtitles! If you want Bots High translated in another language, I’ll gladly provide the English transcript to work off of. Just let me know.

Bad Astronomy has just published their best astronomy photos for 2010. They’re all breathtakingly stunning. Check all 14 out here.

For those that are subscribed to Robot Magazine, check out the November/December issue for a four page article on Bots High! If you’re not subscribed, the issue should be hitting newsstands soon (along with an excerpt online – I’ll post the link when it’s up).

If you’ve found yourself here because you just read the article, then welcome! Bots High is a documentary I’ve been working on for over a year. I’m currently wrapping up editing, and then the film will be sent off to get the sound and image polished. It’ll hit the festival circuit early next year.

Here are ways to stay connected with the film:

• Newsletter – Sign-up for the newsletter. Frequency is about once a month, if that, so you won’t be getting bombarded with emails. This is also the best way to find out about screenings and DVD releases.
• Facebook Page – Most of the updates I post are here, along with links to cool things I find online.
• Twitter – I post a lot of updates here too
• YouTube & Vimeo – There are a few podcasts up. As editing the actual documentary comes to an end, more podcasts will start coming up. In a way they’ll be mini-documentaries. I shot over 100 hours of footage. 1% of that made it into the film. There’s lots of little side stories that just couldn’t fit into the film, and they’ll be put online.

Thanks for checking out the film! Please feel free to leave any questions or comments below.

It’s been too long since we walked on the Moon | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine.

Search the PopSci Archives | Popular Science.

Check it out! Get 137 years of PopSci for free online now.

Top 10 Battlebot Moments | Robotworld

I wish HD existed back then.

PR2 Beta Program: The Call for Proposals is Out! | Willow Garage

Don’t really know much about this PR2 Beta robot, but if you can prove that your institution would put it to good use, you can apply to get one for free.

Personally if WALL-E and Eve had a baby, I think it would look something like this.

It works off Robot Operating System, or ROS 1.0, which seems to be an open source programing language for robots.

As BotJunkie puts it, “Basically, the idea behind ROS is to keep people from having to reinvent the wheel over and over again for each new robot, so that people can spend their time improving the wheel and inventing the hoverpad, as it were.”

(via BotJunkie)

“Everybody’s trying to teach preschoolers how to read and nobody is trying to teach them how to do math”…

In some ways the new program is standard children’s fare. The main characters are miniature superheroes — a boy, a girl and a break-dancing robot — who zoom about fixing simple crises in their city, whether a shortage of milk, a lost kite or a subway system stalled by a dropped mitten. But the show is infused in all aspects — down to character Milli’s pony tails that turn into a ruler — with concepts from an interactive math curriculum that the characters tap to solve their problems, including shape-matching, counting, simple computation and measurement.

New Nickelodeon Show to Focus on Math – NYTimes.com

No idea what an Umizoomi is in Nick’s new show “Team Umizoomi,” but it’s cool that they’re aiming to teach kids math, which they say is an area left pretty opening in children’s television, aside form Sesame Street. Plus it stars a robot.

The construction and competition of combat robots is a hobby for all but a select few builders. Robots builders may be middle-aged engineers, or enthusiastic teenagers. Robot building can teach young people a great deal about technology, and some schools use the construction of combat robots in their courses.

via Everything You Wanted to Know About Fighting Robots as Sport | The Russian electronic novelties.

More cool concept illustrations. I love the colors and renderings in this collection, plus the 40s throwback.

concept robots: Concept robots by Brian Despain.