Ok, I promise not to keep this up. But this one will kill you.
See, this robot walks into a bar. And the bartender says "Say, we don't get many robots in here." So the robot draws himself up to his full height, and he says "100111011011111011001000001100001110111011001001
00000110000111101001000001110100110100011001011
1100111100101100000111000011100101101001110001111
00101111001110110010000011110011101111111010110011
11110010110010110000011011101101111111010010000011
01100110100111010111100101110110011110011000001110
100110111110000011100111100101110010110000011000
011101110111100110000011011011101111111001011001011
00001".
Get it?
All posts copyright © 2006-2018, Peter Davis. All rights reserved.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Robot Jokes
One casualty of this age of political correctness is the ethnic/minority joke. Such jokes are offensive in the extreme, and serve to reinforce outdated and destructive stereotypes.
However, it's also obvious that this type of humor fills a basic human need ... the need to deride and mock anyone different from ourselves. There have been ethnic jokes ever since one tribe encountered another and thought their hats were funny looking. Anthropologists have even observed chimpanzees imitating gibbons and laughing.
So, to fulfill this basic human need, we propose adoption of the robot joke. There's certainly much to mock about robots ... their cool, mechanical personalities, their shiny surface appearance, and their smug attitude of superiority. (Geez, I really hate that.) And by the time robots are actually aware and sensitive enough to take offense at such jokes, they will have taken over the world, and will be making human jokes.
So here goes:
The robots and the humans are fighting a war. The humans learned that a common robot name is X374K, so they started calling out "Hey, X374K!" When X374K stood up to respond, they would shoot. Blam! This went on for a while, until the robots decided to reciprocate. So they took a nanosecond to find that a common human name is Jack. The robots called out "Hey, Jack!" But the humans, wise to this trick, didn't stand up. They just yelled back, "Jack's not here. Is that you, X374K?" When the robots answered ... Blam!
So the robots destroyed all the humans.
Pretty funny, huh?
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Wrong-headed
Just to get something straight, I think everybody is wrong. I don't say this lightly. I've given the matter considerable thought over a number of years, but I find this conclusion inescapable. This view has been confirmed for me by the collection of micro-essays in the book What Have You Changed Your Mind About. Basically, the book is a collection of very short essays by a bunch of incredibly smart people, all talking about ideas they held at one time, but later abandoned for various reasons.
What Have You Changed Your Mind About is an excellent book. Well, no it's not. Ok, it is.
The point is that nobody really has a handle on reality. No political parties. No religious institutions. No philosophers. Nobody! We see only a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. We hear a narrow range of sound wave frequencies. We're stuck looking at the universe from a tiny planet in one corner, where things that are too tiny or too big are all but invisible. We can use instruments to look at things that are tiny, or very far away. But these only expand our range a little bit. To draw conclusions about reality is like peering through the keyhole of a big mansion, and trying to deduce the color of the toilet paper in the master bathroom.
And the instruments have their own inherent flaws. Basically, they convert things we can't perceive into things we can. Telescopes, microscopes, amplifiers, etc. all make distant or tiny or quiet things appear closer or bigger or louder. Our mental model of the universe is based on just a few very primitive ideas we learn early on. So by magnifying or amplifying things, we make them comparable to familiar objects. The moon through a telescope looks like a ball out in space. Microorganisms are little squishy things. But the scale of these things is part of their reality. Putting them on our scale creates a distortion.
Anyway, I didn't mean to start down that road. I'll come back to that another time.
The other thing about everyone being wrong is that usually, when our beliefs are challenged, our first reaction is to cling to them more strongly, and to defend them. Belief systems are very comforting, because they allow us to ignore the vast unanswered questions and simply deal with the mundane business of getting through the day.
My point was that nobody knows how to fix health care. Nobody knows how to prevent terrorism. Nobody knows how to structure an economy that balances liberty with justice, so people are free to pursue their goals, but nobody gets treated unfairly. Nobody knows how to govern.
So if I occasionally rail against one political party or view or set of beliefs, that's just what's bugging me at the moment. I could undoubtedly find something just as ludicrous about the opposite view.
Oh, and when I say everyone is wrong, I'm including myself.
What Have You Changed Your Mind About is an excellent book. Well, no it's not. Ok, it is.
The point is that nobody really has a handle on reality. No political parties. No religious institutions. No philosophers. Nobody! We see only a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. We hear a narrow range of sound wave frequencies. We're stuck looking at the universe from a tiny planet in one corner, where things that are too tiny or too big are all but invisible. We can use instruments to look at things that are tiny, or very far away. But these only expand our range a little bit. To draw conclusions about reality is like peering through the keyhole of a big mansion, and trying to deduce the color of the toilet paper in the master bathroom.
And the instruments have their own inherent flaws. Basically, they convert things we can't perceive into things we can. Telescopes, microscopes, amplifiers, etc. all make distant or tiny or quiet things appear closer or bigger or louder. Our mental model of the universe is based on just a few very primitive ideas we learn early on. So by magnifying or amplifying things, we make them comparable to familiar objects. The moon through a telescope looks like a ball out in space. Microorganisms are little squishy things. But the scale of these things is part of their reality. Putting them on our scale creates a distortion.
Anyway, I didn't mean to start down that road. I'll come back to that another time.
The other thing about everyone being wrong is that usually, when our beliefs are challenged, our first reaction is to cling to them more strongly, and to defend them. Belief systems are very comforting, because they allow us to ignore the vast unanswered questions and simply deal with the mundane business of getting through the day.
My point was that nobody knows how to fix health care. Nobody knows how to prevent terrorism. Nobody knows how to structure an economy that balances liberty with justice, so people are free to pursue their goals, but nobody gets treated unfairly. Nobody knows how to govern.
So if I occasionally rail against one political party or view or set of beliefs, that's just what's bugging me at the moment. I could undoubtedly find something just as ludicrous about the opposite view.
Oh, and when I say everyone is wrong, I'm including myself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)