Via slashdot:
(Robotic Freedom, by Marshall Brain): “There is no reason to expect that the economy will suddenly figure out a way to create high-paying, exciting, fulfilling jobs for these tens of millions of people displaced by robots. If the economy could do that, it would be doing it now.
Of course, this is assuming that our economy won’t be run by a bunch of super-genius robots.
Relive your favorite Saturday Night Live skits here (Saturday Night Live Transcripts). There are some SNL commercial spoofs that are burned in my brain forever (Happy Fun Ball).
Funniest thing I have read this morning comes from an article entitled “Sleep Behavior of Cats”:
Nobody is sure why cats sleep so much. (PetPlace.com)
OK, the new G5s are out, but right now I’m burning a CD, listening to the BBC on streaming audio, browsing the web, and checking email, all on my iMac 350. It’d be nice to have a faster CD burner, I guess, and eventually I’d like to have a DV cam, but as long as this machine chugs along, there’s no compelling reason to buy the new box. . . .except that the inner geek in me demands it.
In the meantime, there’s always this (powerlogix).
I travel a lot, or have been the last few months. I have discovered through my travels that I like airports. I’m not sure why, but they seem optimistic places, full of potential. People get on planes with a purpose, good or bad. Often, the traveler is ambivalent; you can see it in his or her face.
I am entertained by watching people at the gate, trying to discern their reason for traveling. Most are business travelers, like myself, dressed in typical corporate traveling attire: khakis, running shoes, digital watch, laptop. There are the tourists, of course. And then there are the ones clearly forced to travel by dire necessity. These people are the most interesting to watch. All of their tickets cost too much.
As a social system in time and space, the airport is, of course, qualitatively different from any local community. It is not constructed as a permanent, self-reproducing social system. It is marked by transience.. . . [T]he airport may function, for the traveller, as a kind of catharsis: The moment one passes through immigration into the departure lounge, one is removed from the impediments of society: Once there, neither the tax collector nor the family can reach you. You are a free individual.
Here is a really cool collection of webcasts, animations, and videos from those zany guys at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (jpl.nasa.gov). I like the one about black holes. Lots of people complain about how their tax money is spent and how we need to “build schools, not bombs.” It’s too bad interesting and educational byproducts of the military industrial complex are overlooked.
It’s also nice to know that, when we eventually find that advanced intelligent life-form somewhere in the galaxy, we’ll have the hardware to prevent us from becoming some sort of intergalactic hors d’oeuvres. Go JPL!
As if Google needed to be any more useful, now it has a cool calculator function (more about calculator). Go ahead, enter any mathematical function, i.e., “2+2,” and you’ll get an answer (4!). It even works for word problems–sort of: (half a bushel in pecks).