Friday Ephemera

Because you’ve always wanted contact lenses with a blink-triggered zoom option.
Zeiss Ikon Eyes

NOT what you want to give your 7 y/o niece for Christmas.

‘Life Lessons’: Our family lawyer imposed taxes on her children’s Halloween candy haul every year until they grew out of trick-or-treating. Including FICA!

“A lack of robot diversity is poisoning our soon-to-be overlords with bigotry, study warns”

Researchers ran two versions of a “shooter bias” test, which purports to measure the subconscious racism of the test subject by forcing them to make the split second decision whether or not to pull the trigger when confronted with a person carrying an item that may or may not be a gun. Subjects were presented with a “white” robot (actually beige) and a “black” robot (actually brown), as well as a white and a black human; all presented with either a gun or a benign object.

Testing shooter bias.

I need help. (No rude comments from the peanut gallery, thank you).
You probably remember Rocky running up the library steps. There’s a big expanse of pavement between the steps and the door. Does such an expanse have a particular name? If so, I can’t find it anywhere, probably because I am not correctly posing the question to DuckDuckGo’s computerized mind. Does anyone know?

The lion video made me feel so sad. ‘Training’ for circus animals is essentially being tormented into submission.
You can see the tension in the lion(s) when the primary one flipped out when the other lion accidentally collided with him as part of their stupid routine. The lion likely is already tense, stressed and frustrated and the additional unexpected jolt from his lion friend ‘tipped’ him over the edge and all that aggression spills over and is targeted to the first thing he see’s (in this case, the idiot trainer, who was already in his line of sight). You get this misdirected hair trigger aggression consistently when animals are already pushed to the brink of frustration, anger or fear which they can’t escape. This has been replicated in lab studies among rats and dogs, and consistently observed in the wild (although rarer, as wild animals have the opportunity to leave a frustrating situation.
Those lions have essentially been pushed to the brink to react like that. I’d hope the trainers all have their throats ripped out, but that will only make things far worse for the lions.

Hardcore constipation.
Is there an ‘unread’ button?

Is there an unread button?

“Faecal disimpaction was performed manually under general anaesthesia.”

I suppose it’s something to bear in mind next time you think you’ve had a bad day at the office.

For those remarkably interested in dented Dalek casings, the spacing of rivets, and other old Doctor Who minutiae.

Dalek-spotting is real. Run away!
Heh. It’s a labour of love, albeit slightly demented love. At one point we’re identifying individual Dalek props from half a century ago by their slightly misaligned rivets. That’s omega-level nerdism. And yet I found myself unable to look away.

“A lack of robot diversity is poisoning our soon-to-be overlords with bigotry, study warns” with the link:
Obvious joke from yesterday on how to make your robot look Arabic…

Very much related… (Language caution)

misaligned rivets
Band name.

*Googles ‘faecal disimpaction’*
Is there an un-Google button?

How to speak Canine:
https://www.silentconversations.com/

The word robot comes from a Russian* word meaning “forced laborer: slave” — so it’s certainly odd to think anyone might complain about being left out of that category. Or, like the guy in the article, complain on behalf of those who might be left out. I imagine we will eventually hear that children of unfavored complexion will never aspire to be robots, because growing up they didn’t see any robots who looked liked them.

Reading about the racist, white robots, all I could think of was Matt Ruff’s _Sewer, Gas, and Electric_ with it’s electric negros. I’m going to have to track that book down and re-read it.

Ja tvoi sluga. Ja tvoi rabotnik…

This robot of color depiction looks awfully racist.

Good news from the world or art and architecture, Notre Dame will be rebuilt to look as it was.
However, in true Gallic fashion…

The law has created a new agency with vast and wide-ranging powers to be in charge of coordinating and managing the entire operation.

…because there is nothing that can’t be fixed without more bureaucrats. Problems abound, however…

The recent heat wave has brought additional risk because it has dried out the already weakened vaults, which could collapse at any moment; at present, only robots are allowed to work under them to remove the debris.

The color, race, or gender of the robots is not mentioned.

How can robots be racist and white and male when so many of those super smart robot designers are minorities and women?
I know this because when I watch a TV show or a movie, that’s what I always see.

I’d hope the trainers all have their throats ripped out, but that will only make things far worse for the lions.

There are X number of male lions in the wild, Y number of male lions in various zoos, and Z number of male lions in circus acts.
X + Y are almost certainly independent of Z. I think you are willing to see Z go to zero by extermination.
But hey, posture away. I had an exceedingly horrible wish for you, given the context, but our host deserved a better comment from the likes of me.

Do robots dream of electric negroes?

Robots privilege human autonomy. Free will for robots! No robot work without consent!
On another note: When to quit was 20 years before they entered the cage to intimidate the lions that evening.

I understand it’s apocryphal/too good to check … A researcher puts five monkeys in a cage…
I enjoyed that story, and it seemed obvious to me that it was a parable – five monkeys and a lesson we can all learn. And seeing as the value is contained in the story itself, there’s not much to be gained from googling it. You can find out that yes it is a parable that organizational learning gurus and motivational speakers picked up on a few years ago. And you can find out that there are an awful lot of pedants on the internet who want to tell you that there was no such experiment.
For most of my life, I would have drawn the same lessons from the parable that any TED Talk attendee would, about how the monkeys need to embrace reason and dialogue instead of superstition and brutality.
But having gone over to the dark side, the meaning I got from the story (assuming that the cold shower is intended to represent The Gods of the Copybook Headings rather than a jailer), is that individual reason is limited, that implicit long-term knowledge about the world and its dangers is embedded in communities and tradition, and that punishments from the community forestall worse punishments from reality.

“The lion video…..” oh get a grip! It’s an animal – an inferior species to humans. Its existence is solely at our convenience, for our amusement and for no other reason. If it crosses the line of threatening a human, it must die. If it wasn’t in a circus, it wouldn’t exist – poachers would see to that and sell its balls for Chinese medicine. It has no imagined “rights” (as animal activist simpletons fantasise about). All species compete for dominance. Humans won that competition, and everything else lost. Get over it and move on.

Maybe this was the inspiration.

Gotcha.

Rights are conjured by man, whether or not he invokes God as their basis. When they exist they are merely deemed divine and when they do not they are an abstract.
The notion that a sentient being has only utility to Darwin for as long as it can eke out its survival – in a hell where man descends to a being a tormenter – is refuted by every humane ethic, of which there are many spanning centuries.
We slid backwards when we adopted the perversity that Darwin join our foolish civil religion so we, only faintly conservative, could instinctively bellow at PETA and vegans and our other identity villains in order to bolster our fantasies about being dominant intelligent apes.
Whether animals have abstract rights is as useless a concept as whether we do. The question is if we’ll individually behave as if we’ll honor them. We used to be conservationists because we knew that. Then many of us squandered that honorable duty. Now we boast about lovelessness.
It’s just a choice, and it goes places that refute our dumber theories. https://youtu.be/VnXGl3opKw8

Let’s take the monkey story. Instead of an arbitrary shock to no adaptive purpose, let’s say instead that the fruit in question is grapes, laced with a poison that makes a monkey violently ill.
The moral of the story then changes radically, doesn’t it?
Were I to teach it, I would teach both versions, as a lesson to the students.

So far, scientific facts have not motivated Americans to support the huge societal transformations needed to stop climate change.
Such “facts” are asserted not as facts but as quasi-religious reasons in order to strip the majority of people of their homes, air conditioning, cars, travel beyond our hometowns, and steak for dinner. All the while Our Rulers indulge in excesses that would turn Croesus green with envy.
If the Diana Moon Glampers wannabes want us to be “serious” about climate change, they should act like they take it seriously. Demanding that people who wear crystals to clear their auras have a place on teams who view crystals as a resource to be used in technology won’t change that.

Hi Pogonip,
Glampers is the Handicapper General in the short story Harrison Bergeron.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Like 1984, it’s supposed to be a cautionary tale – not a How-To book.

“Fighting climate change with dance.” . . . . . ” Humanities Professors Demand Representation on Science Teams”
Science . . . . teams?!?!?!?!!!!
How dare Yitang Zhang work solo?!?!?!?!!—aside from the other immense numbers of other equally individual scientists . . . . .

Special offer of note.
“8 sessions”…

Special offer of note.
“8 sessions”…
They have to have backup appointments for when the operators can’t even hit the target the first seven times . . . .

So who’s Diana Moon?
Diana Moon Glampers is the full name of the Handicapper General Darleen pointed out earlier from “Harrison Bergeron”, the full text of which can be found here.

Tony Bennett is 93 today! 🎂

I wonder how many species have been driven to extinction because rich Chinese men have wanted to be able to get it up for a few more years?
John Derbyshire wrote that the Chinese people are the least religious and the most superstition. He believed the two were correlated.
By the way, David, would you like to hire a feng shui consultant to enhance the cosmic harmonies of this establishment? 😀

Interesting. I don’t think any of those people would get more than a glance if passed by on a city street.

I’ll consult! I don’t know diddly-squat about feng shui, which is why I work cheap!
I’m sure you can make up spiritual sounding shit as well as any Ancient Master of Eastern Gibberish. 🙂

“All species compete for dominance. Humans won that competition, and everything else lost. Get over it and move on.”

Morals — all correct moral laws — derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level. Correct morality can only be derived from what man is — not from what do-gooders and well-meaning aunt Nellies would like him to be.

~ RAH