OK Sen. Coburn Report Shows Taxpayer Money Spent on Robots That Fold Laundry, Shrimp on Treadmills

You've probably heard of shrimp on the barbie, but what about shrimp on a treadmill?

The National Science Foundation has, and it spent $500,000 of taxpayer money researching it. It's not entirely clear what this research hoped to establish.

But it's one of a number of projects cited in a scathing new report from Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, exclusively obtained by ABC News.

It's not just shrimp on a treadmill. The foundation spent $1.5 million to create a robot that can fold laundry. But before you try to buy one to save some time, consider that it takes the robot 25 minutes to fold a single towel.

The list goes on. Lots of people love to use FarmVille on Facebook, but lots of people probably don't love the government's spending $300,000 in taxpayer money to study whether it helps build personal relationships.

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/oklahoma-sen-tom-coburn-report-shows-taxpayer-money/story?id=13689403

that there is no wasteful spending in the government. There's plenty, but $500,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to the wasteful spending by the Pentagon and the MIC.

It's typical of the support for guys like Coburn while also posting anything that smears a Dem.

Spotted it a long time ago, but nobody listens.

and plenty of threads noting Coburn's lunacy over the years.

and the cost would equal what the military spends in a day. Every day. Forever.

And how much staff time did Sen. Coburn waste ferreting out these paltry couple of millions, when a .0037 second Google search would have found several times that much waste in Iraq or Afghanistan yesterday?

With a defense budget of 881 Billion per year, you could fund that $500,00 project every year for the next 1,762,000 years.

.

Of all the treadmills I have seen, you wouldn't have to fold the shrimp to get them on.

Or did I read that wrong, are the robots folding shrimp into shirts WHILE they are on a treadmill?

i`d rather imagine it`s a complex problem for a robot.

It's not about a robot that folds laundry - it's about developing systems that can perform complex, cognitive functions. I'm sure "folding laundry" was one of a number of tasks attempted.

Of course, you take it out of context and it appears superfluous.

The towel/robot thing I get - it is a very simple task for a human, but unless the towel is placed before the robot lying perfectly flat, it would be incredibly difficult for a robot to do - find the corners, align them fold once, find the new corners without losing the first fold, align them again, etc.

Would 'exercising' shrimp cause faster growth, and earlier harvest?
Or is the shrimp exercise also a robot exercise, studying how multi-legged animals move, enabling us to move from wheeled to multi-legged rough terrain robots?

What did Carl Sagan call it? The giggle factor? Rethugs are good at it. Until it blows up in their faces - like giggling at "volcano studies".

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15319541/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/scientists-put-shrimp-treadmill/

What gets me is the fisherman I've know are some of the loudest mouth rethuglicans you want to know. You know the type: "I lift myself up by the bootstraps" hardworking types. Watch Deadliest Catch for an example. They ignore the help they get from the big bad gubmint. They only bitch how the gubmint won't let them bleed the fishing areas dry.

....because the people who write this stuff wouldn't have the first clue what ANY scientific research program is trying to establish or why.

Incidentally, there is a huge freaking shrimp industry that generates a lot of economic activity. Perhaps the authors of this article would like to explain the current state of the art in assessing shrimp population health in response to environmental or immunological challenges.

Or, maybe they'd just like to spew more oil into the Gulf of Mexico and say the shrimp are doing just fine.

We are going to drown in anti-science nitwittitude.

Of course there's waste. Waste and fraud that occur in private industry too.


I would not trust anything Coburn "reported" on without having some context. There's almost always more to the story.

Remember when... was it Bobby Jindal? railed against volcano monitoring? Yeah, that's just nonsense.

WASHINGTON - Three U.S. senators have called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to account for 8.8 billion dollars entrusted to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq earlier this year but now gone missing.

(August 21, 2004 by the Inter Press Service)

how much is his Federal Fetus Police Force going to cost?

Where can I get one? I fucking HATE folding laundry.

Even if the purpose of SOME kinds of research isn't immediately obvious, there is probably a pretty good reason for it -which is beyond the comprehension of Republicans.