sorry for all the spamming today

[paperclippy]

but this was pretty funny . . . I'm looking for some papers for research, and I came across the following citation:

Edan, Y., Rogozin, V., Flash, T. and Miles, G.E. (2000) Robotic Melon Harvesting, IEEE Trans. on Robotics and Automation, 16:831-835.

I had no idea people published in IEEE transactions about melon harvesting. I wonder if someone wrote a PhD dissertation about melon harvesting. Somehow that sounds like something that fits better in an agriculture department! (Actually I think it could be interesting, but I am too lazy to read the article.)

Also, for those of you who think arguing research scientists are funny: http://isb.ri.ccf.org/biomch-l/archives/biomch-l-1996-02/00187.html Basically it is a discussion from a mailing list where a bunch of well-respected scientists start to get into a flame war about whose theories are correct!

Comments

[capnqueeg.livejournal.com]

The article is actually quite interesting, and contains some nice quotes: "Melons are delicate, fleshy fruits," "Knowledge-based rules adapted to each specific melon variety were applied to recognize the melons using spatial characteristics of
objects in the integrated image," "Location coordinates (X and Y ) and diameter of
each identified melon were extracted, " etc. Actually I think the word melon is just funny. There is also a nice picture of the harvester. And most impressively, they managed to harvest 85% of the melons!

This all sounds like rather more fun than reading about conditional databases, which is what I should be doing... sigh.