This is a hillarious way to commemorate the anniversary of Apollo 11. Its a parody on all those people that think the moon landing was a hoax. My favorite parts:


...But NASA scientists quickly realized that traveling to the moon is impossible. The Van Allen radiation belts will kill anybody who tries to reach the moon. NASA officials knew this early on and realized that they would have to fake it. In fact, one of the reasons that the CIA, Lyndon Johnson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military-industrial complex, and the Knights Templar had John F. Kennedy killed was because Kennedy was about to cancel the Apollo program...

George Bush was told to invade that country by his Saudi masters, some of whom are not even human, but aliens. Why do you think Saudi “women” wear those burkas? They hide their tentacles. Fortunately, Michael Moore is investigating...



It seems like a million years since my last entry. No, I still haven't found NEEMO. But in the meantime, I've had a lot of fun working the mission. I worked my last real shift yesterday and my last telecon this morning. Back to normal life, work, schedule. Which will be good for my sanity. But it was really fun working something like that, mixed in with all the work, to have the crew tell you they just saw the biggest crab ever. Or saw a shark doing "aileron rolls" in the sand. Or, like yesterday, and call to ask if you were on-console to let you know that Becca North is a really awesome line (how sweet to keep the support staff happy!).

Ok, I've written two paragraphs for this entry and then deleted them both. One was about having nightmares about the start of the semester. The other was about missing flying. Both were kind of depressing, so I deleted them. One of my co-workers just came in and told all about his three week trip to Africa. They climbed Killamajaro, which makes the two big hikes we're doing this season seem like a stroll up a hill. And then they went on safari and to beaches in Zanzabar. Now I want to go to Africa even more, but I definitely don't want to climb a 20,000 ft mountain.

I saw I, Robot this weekend, and was pleasantly surprised. The movie actually preserved the Three Laws of Robotics, crossed over some characters and scenarios from the collection of short stories, and tried to stay at least somewhat faithful to the universe envisioned by Isaac Asimov in the 1940s (before there was such a thing as a personal computer, I may remind you!). It really was bothering me when reviewers accused the movie of borrowing elements from Terminator and Robocop and such, rather than acknowledging the influence that I, Robot had on them (trivia: Isaac Asimov invented the term "robotics"). I read all of the NY Times yesterday (ok, at least the articles that interested me) and they actually did one of their consensus editorials on it(or whatever real newspaper people call them -- the one's with no author on the sidebar). We, robots

Now that "I, Robot," a technophobic thriller starring Will Smith, has hit movie screens nationwide, it's worth remembering Isaac Asimov's accomplishment in the book of the same name, which was first published in 1950. True, the humans in Asimov's book seem more than a little robotic, despite their snappy, Batman-like dialogue. ("Holy space!") Donovan and Powell — the robot-testers — resemble Cub Scouts in adult bodies. And as for Susan Calvin, the rather dried-up robopsychologist, well, it's simplest to say that she bears as much resemblance to her screen counterpart, played by Bridget Moynahan, as Asimov's robot stories do to this movie.



As machines, Asimov's robots are not very important. Asimov invests almost nothing in imagining how they look. What makes them interesting isn't sentience or consciousness or a human appearance. It's the fact that the machines embody three hierarchical laws that require robots to protect humans from harm, to obey humans and, a distant third, to protect themselves. Each of the stories in "I, Robot" works out a problem in the application of these laws, usually caused by an unforeseen implication or contradiction. Asimov's robots are perfectly logical, and therefore all the real problems are caused by humans, who are shockingly unaware of the way their intentions and emotions run counter to logic. What look like manufacturing flaws in the robots nearly always turn out to be faults in the way a command was articulated. Humans, it turns out, are mainly good at bossing other humans around. Our computers remind us of this every day.



There may be nothing subtle about Asimov's prose. But there is a great deal of subtlety in the strangely narcissistic relationship he creates between humans and robots. The very existence of robots leads, in Asimov, to immediate questions about human nature — not as it's expressed in the robots themselves but as it's expressed in their relationship with humans. After all, those three ironclad laws create a framework for decency that — as Susan Calvin might say — few people ever display. It's no wonder Hollywood prefers simply to fear robots, as it does in "The Terminator," "The Matrix" and now "I, Robot," to name only a few examples. It's vastly easier and more thrilling than introspection.

Ok, time to get started on work-work now.