Sure, there are lots of hard-hitting tech stories we could lead with in this week’s Technology Podcast. But when you have a listener-generated item on kid-sized humanoid robots playing soccer, I think it’s pretty clear how you’re going to kick-off (oooh, sorry) the show. Listener Tam Eastley at the Free University of Berlin told her friend Stefan Otte to email me about FUmanoids, a team at the university that is working on robotic soccer players. Currently ranked second in the world to the Darmstadt Dribblers, FUmanoids are looking ahead to RoboCup 2010 in Singapore. We get Stefan on Skype to chat about how these pint-sized players work in teams to try to score goals, etc. My favorite quote, “People mostly kind-of like to watch the robots fall down.” And based on the video below, there’s plenty of that. However, to give credit where credit is due, think about how far robotics have come in the last five years alone, let alone the last 25 years. I think what the robots are doing in the video is pretty amazing. The goal of RoboCup, by the way, is to field a robotic team that can beat human players by the year 2050.

Here are some other links from the show that may be of interest:

• Google bosses convicted in Italy
• Google faces European competition inquiry
• Latvian ‘Robin Hood’ hacker leaks bank details to TV
• British Library warns UK web heritage ‘could be lost.’

Remember, you can check out our travel podcast, which this week features a cool segment on Google Maps and Russian Railways joint project to create a virtual Trans-Siberian Railway. As I also mentioned, my colleague Rhitu Chatterjee has a podcast segment, and is running a World Science Forum, on the psychology of suicide bombers.

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This week’s podcast is hopelessy devoted to Brit-English. First, the story of what might be the earliest audio archive of regional British dialects. During World War One, German linguist Wilhelm Doegen recorded the voices of more than 140 British prisoners of war. His archive includes dialects from many parts of the UK — tows like Aberdeen, Macclesfield, Bletchington and Wolverhampton. In those days of course, Britain’s imperial reach was global, as was its army’s linguistic reach: Doegen recorded soldiers speaking Hindi, Punjabi, Pashto and Bengali, among other languages. Until recently, the recordings languished in relative obscurity (for the British at least) at the Berliner Lautarchiv at Humboldt University in Berlin. Now, the British Library has acquired a digital copy of the archive.

Then, wine labels. They don’t make much sense at the best of times. Now, British convenience store chain Spar has found a way to make them almost completely incomprehensible. Spar has ahem, translated them into some of the same regional accents (though with less of an eye for accuracy) as those recorded by Herr Doegen. The company says it’s all about making wine talk more regionally relevant. It may also be, excuse the pun, a dry comment on the pretentiousness of label literature. Never one to defer to the European palate, we at the pod add a little New World flavor with a label rendered in Bostonian English.

It’s well known that English is a co-optive language; there’s nothing it likes better than to beg, borrow and steal from anything in the vicinity. It did plenty of that in the wake of a momentous episode in British history, the Battle of Hastings in 1066. That was when William of Normandy (also known as William the Bastard) became William the Conqueror (and later King William I). Cue the start of French and Latin’s influence over English. Well, what if the Saxons — the English as they’re sometimes called — hadn’t beaten William and his Normans at Hastings, sent them back to France? David Cowley has written a book called How We’d Talk If The English Had Won in 1066.

Finally a couple of stories related to cockney rhyming slang. These days, rhyming slang is barely in use, except in parlor game form — and of course as something to make money out of. The first story is on an ATM company uses cockney rhyming slang to dispense cash. And then, a little something I did in 1990 for KALX, college radio in Berkeley, CA on the obsessive love that some Americans have not just for rhyming slang but for anything British.

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As promised, this week’s Technology Podcast is devoid of any news, or non-news as the case may be, related to Michael Jackson. Instead, WTP 250 has a heavenly host of stories we hope you’ll find intriguing. At right is a picture of a page from one of the oldest Christian bibles in the world. It’s called the Codex Sinaiticus, and it was written in the 4th century AD. After it was found in a monestary in the Sinai, it’s various pages and fragments were scattered to collections across the world. Now, those fragments and pages have been reunited online. We’ll hear an interview with the British Library’s Head of Collection Care, Helen Shenton. The British Library is one of the partner institutions involved in putting the Codex online. We’ll also have updates on two stories we’ve been following closely in recent weeks. First, the violence in post-election Iran continues, and technology continues to play a critical role. Reporter Cyrus Farivar will update us on the global geeks who are trying to keep the information flowing into and out of the country. We follow that with a look at the violence that has flared in western China, and assess the ways and means that the Chinese government is using to control the way that violence is portrayed. We speak with Xiao Qiang, founder and co-editor of the China Digitial Times. And then we end the podcast with a lovely little story of musical collaboration. The members of Hal and the Big 5 have never actually jammed together. Instead, they’ve traded music tracks in cyberspace, and then mixed it all together. Too cool.

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