Coke bot

Abra a Felicidade Coca-Cola

The link is of a robot serving up dessert and a Coke. Okay, I'm kind of pissed. A couple of years ago I blogged about Coca Cola being able to put out robotic drink machines that at least interacted with you. Have they listened to me? NOOOOooooo.... So today I find the above link via www.botjunkie.com . Yeah, it's a commercial in Brazil. So if they can sponsor robotics in Brazil, why can't they put out a robotic Coke machine on the city streets of America? Hmm? You know they know the tech exists.

Hey, Atlanta, are ya listening? Helloooooo.......

Missikins crossed the "Rainbow Bridge"

Our oldest cat at 18 years passed on Sunday night, somewhere between 9 pm and 2:30 am. While this is not a huge new story for many of you, this blog post is kind of therapy for me.

The Rainbow Bridge is something that I had forgotten about until my wife mentioned it on that Saturday. Up until then, I was totally prepared for the cat's passing. She had been steadily losing weight for months. And before that, she had a steady intake of water. So we had figured at first that she had a tapeworm. Nope. No evidence of worms in her litterbox. So our next natural assumption was either her kidneys were shutting down, or she developed leukemia. This last weekend, she was wobbling very badly, could barely stand up, and never ate.

We buired her yesterday morning. She was a great cat. A stray kitten. The irony is, I first told my wife "Don't pick it up, don't pet it, don't even look at it. It will go away." We already had a 15 year old cat, GiGi, suffering from kidney desease. The very next day, Missy was picked up... By me. I'm so weak.

RIP, Missy. We love you and miss you.

C/Fe

C/Fe. The periodic table of elements codes for Carbon, and Iron. Isaac Asimov first used the combination in his book *The Caves of Steel*:

"See fee? What's that?"

"Just the chemical symbols for the elements carbon and iron, Elijah. Carbon is the basis of human life and iron of robot life. It becomes easy to speak of C/Fe when you wish to express a culture that combines the best of the two on an equal but parallel basis."

"See fee. Do you write it with a hyphen? Or how?"

"No, Elijah. A diagonal line between the two is the accepted way. It symbolizes neither one nor the other, but a mixture of the two, without priority."

The concept is humans and robots working side by side. An old friend of mine back in 1977 coined the phrase "men and machines working together". As far as I know, he never read *The Caves of Steel*.

I would have loved to know Isaac Asimov personally. I could have talked robots with him for hours, I think.

Blog import

Hi, everyone. I was able to import my 360 blogs from Yahoo, and post them here at Wordpress. So I guess I'll be using Wordpress after all Which is a good thing. It beats blogging at Angelfire!

Look out for the crash.

Technology is moving too fast for me to keep up with. Suddenly everyone has to be in touch with each other. Everybody wants instant gratification. If I were to maintain the same amount of information intake today as I did when I got my first Commodore C64, my brain would fry.

I've never been much of a social person. And yet I have accounts with Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and YouTube and I can't remember all the other services. I have photo site accounts with Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa, and Windows Live. Of course I screwed up my Flickr account. And use Photobucket for housing a few avatar images that don't host on some chat sites. In self defense I hardly ever use MySpace and Twitter. Or my cell phone for that matter. And yet I need my daily Internet fix, or I suffer withdrawls. I think maybe my blog here has been read by a handful of people. About the same follow me on Facebook. Even less than that comment on my posts around the web.

What would we do if we scaled back on all this interconnectedness? I seriously think an entire generation would be totally lost. Maybe Ray Kurtzweil is right. Humanity is on a collision course of merging with it's machines. With it's tech. I don't claim to want to become a Luddite. I've been enthusiastic about all the cool stuff happening. But I'm not sure if I'm ready to go the way of the cyborg. I've still got all my appendages. The closest thing to augmentation for me is prescription eyeglasses. And I was wearing those since I was seven.

I don't want to live forever. So look at it this way. About the time America taps the last of it's social security funds for us baby boomers, the gen X'ers will have all merged into it's electronic shells. Machines don't eat, so they don't need jobs. So they won't need to worry about social security since they live as long as the hardware works.

I hope the electric smart grid is in place by then. You 'borgs are gonna need a recharge!

Hello world!

Well, here I am, folks.  I'll attempt to put a link to my old GeoCities site up in a few days after I learn the lay of the land here.  Of course you can still visit the GeoCities site until Yahoo takes it down.

The Default World

Since I've had my iTouch, I've been getting "Burning Man" podcasts. The last one I watched is called One Flame. The interviewee is Crimson Rose. She goes on to describe her part at the Burning Man festival. I won't go into details. Use the link and she what she says for yourself. She does use a term that I find quite different, and all encompassing. After all the fun and nonsense of Burning Man, the attendees must return to the "default world". How refreshing! I've been locking myself into a single description of real life as "physical reality". Which is different from "virtual reality", or my current obsession, "augmented reality". There are so many different ways to divert your attention away, that not all descriptions of the every day will fit. "Default", however, is so well known in so many situations. So I believe I'll be using the term "default world" quite a bit more in my blogging!