Friday and Summer

The real summer arrives today. Forget what I might have said earlier - we're creeping up to the 30degree range today and will sit there, with risks of late-afternoon thunderstorms as we get on those summer heat waves. We're even going to a baseball game on the weekend, so it's probably guaranteed to rain. Anyway, these all seem like summer activities, and I'm looking forward to that phase.

Lawn work as well - I went home a bit early yesterday to mow the insanely growing grass-weed hybrid thing that we call a lawn. I've got some serious tree/shrub trimming to do as well.

So I walk in from the parking lot today thinking about what I will do with my day. Largely these are free days now, as we work toward eventual extrication from the Oceanographic research world. Okay - Python. There I said it. I'm exploring some software things - Python, Django and all the like. I guess that's some more google-bait. But so far it looks pretty good. Vernor Vinge once mentioned that on our way to the singularity (man this paragraph is full of google bait), we are already living in a pseudo machine-intelligence world, in that the Internet is kind of a surrogate collective consciousness. That is very clear when you are dealing with research or technical topics in general. To decipher the means to become adept with a technology two decades ago would have involved finding the right book, which might not even exist. Then copious reading and rooting out roadblocks by isolated brute force. If lucky, you might have had a colleague who'd trodden that path before and could lend a hand, but more often than not you were on your own. Now I post a question to a usenet group. Okay, I guess we've been doing that for 15 years too, but still, it's a recent thing. Now the community is so large that we can get responses in minutes to hours.

This faceless/nameless throng who respond add to our ability to rapidly progress in an area and become adept.

Yesterday I was looking at some U Delft robot walking, and some Asimo walking technology in robotics. There are some pretty strong advances being made. I'm feeling lots of weird things when I look at two men point at a humanoid female robot and talk about what parts are right or not in the eye and mouth movements. How would we react if one of them slapped or punched the robot? Different than if someone slapped or punched their desktop computer? I think so. We will soon have to worry about discrimination and abuse of humanoid robots. Some will care others wont. With that we will begin to get at the root of racism. It's not the act - it's the intent that is offensive. The act is symptom of the greater ill.

Hopefully we sort all that out before they take over. :)

-Researchintor out!