Hold Your Head Simone Giertz and her ridiculous (or not so) robots

On November 1, Simone Giertz turned 30 years old. Her life is like a story. This woman, who was born in Sweden and lives in California, looks like the carpenter Geppetto , the Wright brothers, the crazy Doc Emmet Brown from 'Back to the Future' or the Ada Lovelace of the YouTube era. Some see this young inventor, passionate about robots, as the prototype of the mad scientist of our time. She doesn't care what anyone thinks, she has 2.3 million subscribers on her video channel and a thousand plans ahead of her. Many do not understand why she has invented a photo booth for dogs, a lipstick applicator, a hairdresser drone, a helmet for brushing teeth or an alarm clock that fulfills her function based on slaps. “Useless inventions”, as she likes to call them. Almost 3 years ago, Ella Simone announced that she had been diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. After the operation, in January 2019, she recorded another video to acknowledge that the evil had returned to her brain. That video was viewed more than 3.3 million times. Despite her medical problems, Simone remains true to her life philosophy: invent, invent, invent . Before he could fulfill her robotic dreams, Giertz was a martial arts sportswriter . What things.

Recently, in the summer, the Danish company LEGO released a kit that allows users to create robots to play with : the Mindstorms Robot Inventor. Well, the plastic brick manufacturer gave Simone material so she could invent whatever she wanted and she only thought of making a photo booth for dogs. The animal, once inside the cabin, has to press a button. When she does, the little machine drops a treat for the dog and takes a snapshot . "I turned to my three-legged dog and advisor 'Scraps', who is always with me in the shop. Even though my camera roll contains almost exclusively photos of her, I still want more photos of my little dog, especially during 2020. And what if I cut out the middleman and find a way for her to take her own pictures?" the inventor thought.

Her penultimate creation was a handcrafted Tesla van. On June 18, 2019, she uploaded a video explaining what she was doing. It had more than 12 million views. Today she already has her 'Truckla' running, the first Tesla pickup that Tesla has not manufactured. Giertz usually works in her Californian hangar, pulling friends from the most underground technological world. In this way, she got the cheapest Tesla vehicle on the market, the Model 3, and devised how to cut the entire upper half of the car from the front seats to transform it into a van. Her support team helped her disassemble the vehicle almost completely, using sophisticated cutting tools. Today, Simone travels in it with “her things of hers” of hers.

Daughter of a Swedish television 'ghost hunter' and a television producer, in April 2020, in full planetary confinement, the robotics expert showed another of her inventions on Twitter : “a proud father who for 25 cents gives you a pat on the shoulder,” Simone explained. Uncertainty and strange days cause monsters. In the case of the young Swedish woman, she provokes robots that, no matter how absurd they may seem, fulfill their function . If you want to know more about Simone, in this profile of the journalist Lauren Goode (The Wired) you have all the details of her life.

It is true that there are more and more girls interested in robotics and disciplines linked to the STEAM sectors (Science, Engineering, Art and Mathematics), but they are still a minority. According to the Esplai Foundation, which a few weeks ago presented a video game to encourage female students to be scientists and technologists, it ensures that in Spain only 35% of the students enrolled are women and the researchers who work in these fields only reach 28 %.