the corner office

This might sound like a frivolous post but it's not. 65 years ago young Japanese men were willing to commit suicide to further the cause of their country. The explicit nature of the sacrifice was and remains unfathomable to us in the West, but the Japanese response to the quake and tsunami has already reminded the world how different their culture is. Combine that with an interesting moral question: if you were an engineer at that plant, being bombarded with potentially lethal doses of radiation, but knowing what would happen if you left and allowed the thing to go into meltdown, what would you do?

I think that one of the lessons to be learned from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, no matter what happens over the next few days, is that the world needs better robot technology.