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eftychia at 04:50pm on 2004-05-06
eftychia at 04:50pm on 2004-05-06- Still dreading 17-year-locust season on the East Coast?
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drglam posted this link to
cicada recipes. (No, I'm not going to try them myself. I'm a
vegetarian. But y'all let me know how they are, ok?) - A Dr. Fun cartoon that Fred sent with the note, "Why didn't I think of that?" and which made me go, "Doh! Of course!".
- You can't beat the classics (because if you do, whatever you did becomes a classic). Here's a brief account of one way of dismissing door-to-door religion salesmen.
- Really awesome chain mail (caution, slow to load -- a bunch of other photos there).
-
Crime-fighting ape dies (BBC). "South Africa is mourning the
death of Max, a 200kg gorilla who shot to fame after braving bullet
wounds to overpower an armed robber in his zoo [in 1997]. The
crime-fighting primate died in his sleep, according to Johannesburg
zoo." (thanks to hasfartogo for the link.)
- Transgenic Tombstones (Guardian Unlimited): have a sample of your DNA inserted into an apple cell from which a tree is then grown. "Tombstones are dead, but these trees are living, they are a symbol of life. They could be extremely comforting for people." Of course, regulations on transgenic organisms are a bit of a hurdle. One person called the 20,000 pounds each tree would cost, "cheap for eternal life".
- Simson Garfinkel writes about Robot Sex (Technology Review -- thanks to Fred for the link): "Whether or not you think that gender belongs in our mechanical creations has a lot to do with your vision of how these creatures will fit into our future. It certainly takes more effort to make a robot that's gendered than one that's asexual. But engineers just want to have fun. Building gender into robots might be a way for the robots' designers to express their own playfulness and creativity. Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll discover another reason why gender might be a good thing for our robot servants: gender will make robots more compatible with their human masters." What I find interesting about this is how these ideas mesh with observations about how many people react to transgendered, intergendered, or just gender-ambiguous individuals, the presence of a "sex" box on forms where sex is irrelevant, and the oft heard complaint from genderqueer (and some other transgendered folks), "why is it so important to people to figure out whether I'm male or female"? But I suspect others will find different aspects of the gender question interesting. "'you can't avoid it.' Just think about the classic robot of Star Wars, R2D2. 'Most people would agree that it's a boy,' says Kidd. 'But I can't think of anything that makes R2D2 gendered.'"
- I don't recall whether I've mentioned "brain fingerprinting" here before or not, but here's a Guardian article about it. "Unlike discredited lie-detecting techniques, which measure changes in breathing, heart rate and other variables to determine if suspects are trying to deceive their interrogators, brain fingerprinting is designed to discover if specific information is stored in a person's brain. The technique exploits the fact that the brain emits an electrical signal known as a P300 exactly 300 milliseconds after it is confronted with a stimulus that has special significance to that individual - for example, a victim's face."
- The person who posted
this to a mailing list I read described it as, "Meyers-Briggs
for Gen-Y". It's a computer dating service that offers a free
personality test (which, yes, has four axes and two possible
values for each axis). As with any such online, self-administered,
brief personality test, I'm pretty sure it's value is almost
entirely as entertainment, but it's cute. It labelled me "The
Peach". (vamp_ire also mentioned this site recently.)
- And finally, a link that has me headed back to bed to hide
under the covers and try not to think: silmaril
pointed out this
story of an attempt to make Macedonia look better to the US
by luring seven Pakistanis to Macedonia, then having police kill
them in a murder staged to look like an ambush, and claiming the
seven victims had been terrorists, all in order to "present
themselves as participants in the war against terrorism and
demonstrate Macedonia's commitment to the war on terror."
I weep for my species.
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I probably should have prefaced that with "<lj user="coraline"> posted a photo of", but I figured the credit would be obvious from the URL (and even more so to anyone who clicks through). Hadn't considered the "sneaking up on yourself" aspect it might have for you because I left it off.
I enjoyed several of the other images in that entry, BTW.
re gendered robots
Not extremely related but it shows that people tend to interact with people differently depending on what gender they think they are!
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