Would you buy a robot dog?

A round-up of various things on the great, bounteous, generous sprawl of the internet. A lot of these come from aggregator sites. I'm beginning to wish there was an aggregator of aggregator sites.

SCIENCE! Tiny Hay-specks in the Swiss Cheese / Make the gas holes / Make them round

The mystery of swiss cheese holes has been solved!

CRIME LA mag headline: A Popular West Hollywood Aesthetician Was Arrested for Trying to Murder Her Rival. Was She the Perpetrator—or the Victim?

Any headline that asks a question is usually answered NO, according to the old rule. Judge for yourself if that's the case here. The subject's name is pure LA, and makes you wonder if her parents chose it and were later horrified, or if she chose it to remind people of a genial plump comedic actor, and leach off a few joules of celebrity power. Her name: Dawn DaLuise. (The answer is revealed soon enough; no professional author would leave that detail unexplained.) Good read for the lunchtime hour.

RISE OF THE ROBOT CHEETAHS Yes, it's creepy, and you wish they had heads; they look a bit too much like houndeyes. But the science is remarkable.

Even though they're modeled on cheetah behavior, you can't help but think they'll use this tech to build robot dogs. How many years until you can buy a programmable robot dog? How many owners would bring them to the dog parks anyway, just to pretend?

Later she comes to appreciate, with reservations, what the store provides for small, isolated towns. It's a mixed blessing. A mixed curse. I spend a lot of time on Google Street View looking at small towns - it's a personal project detailing the grim state of the tiny burgs withering on the capillaries of the plains. A lot of those towns never had the variety of goods Wal-Mart brought, and from the looks of them, the rot and decline set in during the Carter years and never really healed. They hit their peak in the 50s, and it's been a long slow slide ever since.

GOOGLE, WHAT IS 2+2? ANSWER: 5 Description of a product roll-out: "The demo was simple, elegant, and enough to make me forget, at least for a moment, about my right buttcheek." It's a Buzzfeed piece about the new Google photo ecosystem. They'll host everything. For free. Forever. What's the catch? C'mon, it's Google.

This fellow is not happy about that. (Warning: some cussing.)

Unless you tell people in your private situations to turn off their phones, but that will soon seem like paranoid lunacy.

Begin the countdown: how long will it take before Google's vast database is regarded as "metadata" and gets used accordingly as a national security tool? It's amusing to see how Orwell got one detail wrong: Big Brother wasn't imposed on society. People volunteered. People invited him in.