Weeder Robots

Last week I invited some readers of a site that addresses "scientists and farmers" to visit this blog. Google says they didn't bother looking for the Glyphosate Awareness posts and links. That would involve advanced research skills like typing the word "glyphosate" into the search field. They are presumably busy doing science, or farming, or scientific farming, or watching all the episodes of Star Trek in a different sequence this time, or something. It is hard to imagine. The people who posted comments at the blog sounded as if they were more interested in watching for opportunities to type RUDE WORDS into the computer while the teacher wasn't watching. Google refuses to report the rude words, so their activity here just sank into the abyss of Google's social credit databanks.

In case anyone is looking for Glyphosate Awareness, most of that content here was posted in 2018-2020. The Newsletters give the full links to what seemed to be the most significant and authoritative news each week. As noted in the "fun" posts during those years, the real link-a-rama is at cat_sanctuary.livejournal.com, which is to a considerable extent my Twitter archive. It's a hodgepodge, with links all anonymized by the Twitter system, but the tweet content should provide some clues to whether I retweeted a cute cat picture or a science link. Google indicates that a lot of you readers watch Twitter and read only the posts here that I tweet, so you already know that I've never stopped reading and retweeting glyphosate-related content on Twitter. 

I am actively working on a book that will clear up what may have become hard to sort out from the blogs alone, with summaries of what I found, when and where. Stay tuned.

A Real Twit known as BeachVetBC or NotoriousKGBAggie is dear to my heart because she's a good skeptic who will point out shortcomings in studies. I could use more Tweeps who would read high-tech articles and do that. The world needs more skeptics, and based on observations of the Beach Vet I suspect it could use more Ukrainians who didn't grow up being told that it was unladylike to disagree with a friend. Glyphosate Awareness was science, not a support group. There is a difference between hostile contradictions uttered just for the sake of hostility, and a good hammer-and-tongs debate that attempts to get at the truth. The former gets people blocked; the latter gets them faithfully followed.

Anyway, at the point of first slowing down and then cutting out the Newsletter, I believed (and none of you disagreed) that youall had enough facts to know that glyphosate is highly toxic and should be banned. I didn't want to keep banging on about it. Apart from the personal status updates I tried to talk about things youall did not already know. 

But the world has not been standing still. For those who need help visualizing a working alternative to the outdated Vicious Spray Cycle, we now have artificial intelligence sites that will help you picture just about anything. Well, if you type in the common or proper name of any living thing, especially on Craiyon, you'll see some creepy-looking alien images, suitable for Halloween science fiction stories and not much else; but if you type in a gadget or a marketing concept you might get some interesting pictures of objects. 

So this post is brought to you by two AI visualization sites, Hugging Faces and Craiyon.

I asked some "artificial intelligence" sites to help people visualize weeder robots. Here are some of the more appealing suggestions: 

It could have a "mouth" for "tasting" plants to separate wheat from tares, and little Edward Scissorhands hands on its forepaws to slice off the tares at ground level. It would continue to home in on cut plants and keep cutting them back if they started to re-grow.

Hugging Faces wasn't quite clear about the anatomy of a "true bug," but that's another robot design with potential. Its long straw-like proboscis could taste plants and fry the undesirable ones with a little electric charge. It could be programmed to scuttle back to its charger when necessary. 

This one was interesting because the program confused different concepts with names that share a lot of letters. I typed in "robot caterpillar." It obviously mixed in the concept of "Roto-Tiller." This is a cute model for a robot that could have chopping blades, an electric-charged probe, or who knows what at ground level. It's big, though, for the task that really wants weeder robots--weeding wheat.

And here the computer was obviously "thinking" about the Mantis tiller. 

Craiyon doesn't know how many legs a stinkbug has, but that could be an asset. This smiling little fellow could have different sensors for different undesirables, recognizing and zapping insects as well as weeds.

Generally Craiyon did better than Huggable Faces at picturing robots that looked like something real, and less well at picturing them "eating" weeds. But it doesn't matter what the superstructure looks like, unless one shape turns out to be beneficial for the slicing and/or zapping mechanisms. Insects are relevant mainly because of their size and shapes, adapted to crawling through wheat fields. If we can get the working mechanism into something the size of a stinkbug or the flexibility of a cutworm, the superstructure can look like anything anyone might fancy: dogs, cars, refrigerators, toy soldiers, crayons, hugging faces, the good ship Lollipop.