Has anyone used a âCluthless boxâ joke yet?
âOur scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.â -MLK Jr.
Looks like Kriegerâs pet project finally saw the light of day
Replace the knife with a laser pointer and perhaps our tub-o-goo cat will finally lose some weight.
And youâll end up in federal prison for lasering ALL the planes.
I want to put that on my bossâs desk, Monday morning, STAT!
Just donât give it any boozeâŚ
Thatâs hard to argue with; itâs more of a question of whether it occurred when we discovered that rocks could deliver more blunt trauma than fists; or with the advent of pointy-stick based first-strike capabilities.
Man, minus the knife, make it, errr, waterproof, ahem and itâd really sell well in Japan (IF you know what I mean). i could see a line of these things in various, errrr, sizes, and ahem, colors, with the ahhhh possibility of variants with multiple arms, maybe some sensors, software routines to work in concert or perhaps learn the preferred shall-we-say-modes-of-operation, ahem. I just patented this. For ummm, personal use. Wait. just patented it for couples, groups and larger audiences (wink!)
The Cthulutizerâ˘ÂŽÂŠ
I am gonna be rich!
I did some succesful-ish preliminary experiments with 3d-printing of elastomeric polypropylene. The objectâs hardness seems to be possible to regulate by a number of outer layers and the density of the infill. The mechatronics could be handled with pneumatics or hydraulics, using printed channels within the material (todo: try). Hydraulics may be better due to the fluid being noncompressible and the result more rigid.
The ribbed nature of the resulting printouts may be problematic cleaning-wise, but that can be handled with suitable coating.
You need a direct-feed, no-bowden extruder for PP. Otherwise you have to print very very slowly; the more elastic the filament is, the slower you have to go.
Chuckling softly to myself.
You could also alleviate the issue by using antibacterial polymer blends, e.g. with nanosilver additives or thymol or other goodies. There are monographs about the blends that I did not read yetâŚ
âŚthatâd also require having a rig for excluding the filaments from custom blends⌠but that should be possible.
Iâm sure I could come up with a suitable programme to, umm⌠control the process: a few lines of APL should do the trick. He did say he wanted a Cthulutizerâ˘ÂŽÂŠ, didnât he? 
that guy missed a great opportunity to make two boxes and have them fight!
Iâd be interested to see it equipped with a marker, so we can see what it is actually hitting. Given that the design doesnât seem to have any active elements within the tentacle, just rotation at the base and letting elastomers and inertia do the rest, the impression of knife-wielding rage is impressively convincing; but it looks like it may be landing quite a few hits on itself.
⌠and in THIS corner, weighing NOTHING AT ALL, the undisputed champion of the world, Whippy Tuuuube Maaaaan
here is the robot licker:
(is it just me or is the lady at the end of the video looking at this demonistration a bit too wistfully?
)
It seems just to be an automaton. It would be a robot[ic] licker if you could move the thing being licked around and it would still find it.
âŚor if it was meant to lick robots! 
