Clearly It's Been Too Long Since I Put Up a Farscape Post.

TV Guide Online has a nice little article about the upcoming Farscape miniseries. People who haven't seen the 4th season and the deeply spoiler-phobic might want to avoid it, but I don't think it really reveals anything you couldn't already guess, plot-wise.

Monster vs. Monster!

With Freddy vs. Jason and now Alien vs. Predator, apparently a lot of people have been inspired to arrange their own Monster Match-Ups. Christopher Bahb has an absolutely hysterical article on the subject, and Matthew Baldwin of Defective Yeti draws up his own Supervillian Tournament Showdown chart, as well as linking to a couple of other people's thoughts on the subject.

Personally, I think I'm putting my money on Agent Smith. It's tough to beat a guy who has the cheat codes to reality.

Here, Have Some Random Links

Just a few interesting links I've picked up here and there. Happy web-surfing.

Hello Cthulhu and Tales of the Plush Cthulhu

Spot the difference between these two photos.

Penguin Warehouse

Hey, Look, It's This Thing Again.

Current clothes: Blue jeans. A t-shirt in a sort of textured brown color that makes it look a little like some kind of stone, covered in a design of Native American petroglyphs. White crew socks. No shoes at the moment.

Current mood: Starting to relax a bit after a rather irritating day.

Current music: Was most recently listening to Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head.

Current annoyance: Being on morning shift, mostly. Well, that and the fact that my foot still hurts.

Current thing: Sitting in front of a computer for up to fourteen hours a day.

Current desktop picture: This picture of the Aurora Borealis.

Current song in head: Coldplay's "The Scientist." But before I answered the "current music" question, I think it was "Porcelain Monkey" by Warren Zevon.

Current book: The Lost Slayer, Part Four: Original Sins by Christopher Golden. It's a Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel (or, OK, 1/4 of one), so apparently I haven't sworn off these things, after all.

Current video in player: Still the same Farscape tape that's been sitting in there forever. I'm a bad, bad fan.

Current DVD in player: The first disc of Futurama season 3. Which appears to be working just fine now. Go figure.

Current refreshment: Darjeeling tea.

Current worry: That this stupid foot thing is going to turn out to require medical intervention and otherwise just be really annoying.

Current thought: Aww. Now I'm out of tea. Maybe I should go and make some more. Or possibly get some food.

At Death's Door

Man, I had this really weird/disturbing dream last night. I'd gone down some stairs in somebody's perfectly ordinary house, and I was in this little basement utility area. It, too, was absolutely normal. There was a door on one side that led to a little bathroom, and a storage room on the other side, and a space beyond that with a washer and dryer and stuff. It was all incredibly detailed and realistic. I remember a bucket with a rag sitting in it, that kind of thing. The place looked perfectly ordinary and used.

But beyond the bit with the washer and dryer, there was a little more space, and there was a door. It was a perfectly ordinary door-to-the-outside kind of door, like anybody might have in their house, and I'm not sure, but there might well have been sunlight visible through it. In front of the door was a man. He was calm. His voice was mild-mannered. He was wearing a suit. And he told me that this place was death, and that once I'd come down those stairs I could never go back up them into the world again. I don't think he ever said it, but the obvious next thing was to go through that door, and he was clearly there to see that I did it.

I had this dream twice. At least, I think I it was twice. It might have been once, and the dream came pre-built with a sense of having dreamed it before. I'm not sure. But in what I remember as the first time, I went and hid in the storage room and shut the door. It was very, very dark and small and enclosed, like a good hiding place. But he very calmly told me that I couldn't stay in there forever, and that when I came out, there was only one place to go. Because you couldn't ever, ever, ever go back up the stairs. In my heart, I knew this was true. The second time I dreamed it, the weight of this knowledge, the sheer horrible unfairness of the thought that just by walking down an innocuous-seeming set of stairs I'd cut myself off from my life forever became simply too much to bear. I knew I couldn't go back up them; that was, like, an unbreakable physical law. So I had to find another way out. I had to escape this level of reality altogether and wake up. So, with a truly massive effort of will, I made myself realize that I was dreaming, and I woke up. Which, by the way, is something I am very rarely able to do, possibly because very few of my dreams are bad enough to require it.

There are probably deep, dark, rich layers of symbolic content in there, but I'm not at all sure I really want to explore them.

The Latest Annoyance

I think my DVD player is dying. I was noticing some problems on the Northern Exposure discs I was playing last week, but I figured that was probably something with the discs themselves. (And briefly debated returning them, but decided they weren't quite messed up enough for that.) Except earlier today I was playing a Futurama disc, and the episode played back fine, but when I tried playing it a second time with the commentary on, it was almost unwatchable. So I stuck it in the computer's DVD drive and played it with the commentary on, and it was absolutely flawless.

Sigh. That DVD player isn't very old, either. Well, I suppose I was looking for an excuse to buy a region-free machine...

Who You Callin' a Pansy?

I'm a Pansy. The bloom of thought. Thoughts are my haven. I prefer solitude and quiet places so I can ponder uninterrupted. What bloom are you? by Polly_Snodgrass

That's definitely right, though. Heck, I'm busy wishing people would leave me alone right now.

All Wet

Long-term readers of this blog will remember the swampy summer of '02, during which the trailer park I live in flooded long enough for entire generations of frogs to lie and die in my front yard. Well, the park's gotten very mud-puddly from time to time since then when we've had big rainstorms, but nothing on remotely the same scale. Until yesterday, that is, when apparently our entire quota of yearly precipitation fell in the space of half an hour[*], and I found myself once again living in the middle of Lake Socorro.

This morning, though, I woke up to find that some blessed soul (probably at the landlord's behest) had installed both a makeshift wooden walkway and a pump in my front yard. It's good to know they've figured out how to deal with this stuff.


[*] Note: Not an actual figure. I completely made it up. But damned if it don't sound about right.

Ouch

My foot hurts, and I can't figure out why. I first noticed it weeks ago, but didn't think much of it at the time. I've had a lot of general achiness in my feet for the last couple of years as my bunions have gradually gotten worse, and sometimes when I've been walking a lot my arches hurt, especially if my shoes aren't laced up exactly right. But this is definitely something different, and there's a spot on the outside of the heel that hurts quite a lot when I press on it. It's weird. There isn't anything visibly wrong with it, and I don't remember injuring it at all. (Well, with the way my memory works, it's always possible that I did and just completely forgot about it, but I don't think so.) Given that it has been weeks, I suppose I ought to think about seeing a doctor or something. I'm not in a big hurry, though. It doesn't hurt anywhere near enough to keep me from walking or anything.

Hic!

Here's a game that'll help you kill a few minutes: try to keep a drunk guy from falling over. The instructions are in German, but they're easy enough to figure out: hold down the mouse button, and if he starts to tip, move the mouse in the other direction. My high score so far is 48 meters of drunken ambling, which is probably pretty pitiful.

Search Request Thursday

the hellmouth spellbook: Oh, man, I really don't think you wanna go messin' with spells on the Hellmouth.

salman khan underarm: Who is Salman Khan, and why are we concerned with his underarms?

dawn legolas fanfiction: Well, that makes a change from the inexplicably popular Willow/Legolas fanfiction people are always coming here looking for.

pfeffernusse what is it supposed to look like: Like this, apparently.

free sex chatbots: Yeah! Free the sex chatbots!

old porn grannys: Old porn grannys never die, they just... No, never mind. There really is no good way to complete that.

sneezing breasts -itching -coughing -congestion: So, uh, what symptoms do your breasts have, then, besides the sneezing?

scooby doo personality and iq quizzes: I'm having an interesting time trying to wrap my brain around the idea of a Scooby Doo IQ quiz.

why does my "swamp cooler" smell like fish? There are so many possible punchlines to that that I think I'll let you come up with your own.

servalan captures photos: How's this?

addiction to hall's honey lemon cough drops: Yeah, that's a hell of a monkey to have on your back.

what does rush's starman mean?: I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

acumen scorpius: Yeah, that guy possesses all kinds of acumen.

curious frog cheating: Looks to be on the up and up to me.

body piercing in pennsauken mart: Oh, yeah, I remember that place. Frankly, it never looked all that hygienic to me.

nude half-orcs: Thank you. I shall now go and wash out my mind's eye with lye soap.

Set Phasers to Stun!

OK, here's another interesting link, this one to a recent CNN article about non-lethal energy weapons being developed by US weapons labs. Interestingly, it sounds to me like they're working not just on what sounds an awful lot like a phaser's "mild stun" setting, but also on the Mirror Universe's Agonizer gadget...

To Quote the CyberLeader: "Excellent."

Looks like the Daleks are going to be returning to Doctor Who after all!

Damn.

Isn't this week over yet?

Hello, Computer!

Today's featured link is Computer Stupidities, a massive collection of Stupid User Tricks and Tech Support Calls from Hell. Some of 'em are a lot funnier than others (I think the ones under "Emergencies" are probably the most entertaining), they do get repetitive fairly quickly, and a few of 'em made me feel mildly stupid. But, man, oh man, after spending the last hour or so on the phone to my Mom saying things like, "Now, right-click. That's the right button. On the mouse. Press the-- No, Mom, that was the left button," while she tried futilely to open an e-mail attachment, I really feel for the people on the support end.

Should I feel bad that in the end I pretty much told my own mother to RTFM?

Heck, It'll Probably Be Better Than the Official BBC Version.

For any Blake's 7 fans in the audience who don't know about this already, there is a short film parody of the series which will be airing at the Edinburgh International Festival this month. You can see a trailer for it here. (Look for the one labeled "Blake's 7 Junction Trailer.) Looks pretty well done to me. Wish I was going to be in Edinburgh to see it.

Let It Rain

It's raining tonight. Rainy nights make me feel all relaxed and comfortable. Well, at least when I'm not worried about the roof leaking, that is. I don't really know why, but I like it.

It Is Kinda Cute.

I'm an Audi TT!

You're not the fastest, nor the most nimble, but you're cute and you have style. You're not intensely competitive, but when you pass by, everyone turns to look.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

Danger, Will Robinson!

A week or so ago, after having seen the movie I, Robot, I mentioned that it'd caused me to have some thoughts about Asimov and Asimov's Laws of Robotics, and about how the movie touched on some things that follow logically from Asimov's postulates but that Asimov himself never really dealt with. And I said I might ramble on about these topics at some point. Well, hey, now seems to be as good a time as any! I don't think I'm actually going to talk about the movie in specific, but at least a couple of the points I've been thinking about are very relevant to the way the movie works out. I'll leave those who've seen it to identify which points those are.

So, right. The Three Laws of Robotics. You know, I've heard occasional bits of speculation (though how serious, I really don't know) about whether Asimov's Three Laws might be useful to incorporate into real-world robots. Personally, I rather doubt it. They're too vague (a point I am definitely going to come back to). But it's easy to understand where Asimov was coming from when he thought them up and why he formulated them as he did. He'd read one too many stories about crazed robots turning on their creators and, frankly, thought that idea was stupid. Robots, he reasoned, were tools, nothing more, nothing less, and tools can and should be designed to specifications that don't include homicidal rampages and plans for world domination.

The most important feature for any tool, he figured, is that it must be safe to use. And the more potentially dangerous a tool is, the more safeguards inevitably get built into it. There's a reason, he said, why you build a saw with a handle, and there's absolutely no reason why we wouldn't build robots with something fundamentally equivalent. Thus, Law 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

The second thing is that if you build a tool, well, hey, you want it to do what it's designed to do. We build robots to do our bidding, thus, Rule 2: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. That "except where" proviso makes sense, because, after all, safety is paramount over efficiency. No machine that performs its job by ripping its operators to shreds is going to be tolerated for long.

Third, a robot is going to be a pretty expensive and valuable tool, and when a tool is expensive and valuable, you want to build safeguards into it to keep it from being damaged. So, Rule 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Again, safety is still paramount, and the phrasing of the rule recognizes that there may well be times when the machine itself may be expendable in the performance of its duty.

So. Those are the Laws. Now, the problems with them...

Problem #1: These laws assume that people will deal with robots fairly intelligently, not giving them conflicting orders or ordering them to do self-destructive things without realizing that they'll be self-destructive. Asimov, like most writers of the era, was mainly writing about extremely intelligent people, and even they occasionally got themselves into trouble with this stuff. Call me a cynic, but I doubt it would work in the real world at all. (Actually, even Asimov seemed to realize this, and allowed for a considerable amount of flexibility in the Second Law, with most robots appearing to have complex additional rules about which orders would be considered to take precedence over which other orders. Still, I don't see any way an Asimovian robot could ever be anything remotely resembling idiot-proof.)

Problem #2: How the heck do you program this stuff in? Asimov, for the most part, was writing puzzle stories: Given these three rules, how can Our Heros figure out why Robot X is doing Strange Activity Y? For this purpose, he had to assume that the Three Laws were absolute and immutable, built directly into the very structure of a robot's brain. They have to exist on a simple, basic level, but the truth is, they're not simple, basic concepts at all. This leads us into:

Problem #3: These rules rely on a hell of a lot of interpretation. This really is the big problem, and it leaves the door open for all kinds of scary nastiness. In particular, there's a couple of words in the First Law that we really need to know the strict definitions of in order to understand exactly what the law is even saying. To begin with, what, exactly, is the definition of "human"? Asimov did touch on this question in his story "Evidence," which considers a robot who is outwardly indistinguishable from a human being, and eventually comes to the conclusion that if such a creature really can't be told apart from a human being, it might as well be treated like one. Which, as far as I'm concerned, is fine. But there's a sinister flip side to that, which is the question of what happens if you can convince a robot to exclude someone, or some group of people, from its definition of "human." Admittedly, it's been a while since I read the stories, but I don't think Asimov ever really deals with that possibility.

The other problem is with the definitions of "injure" and "harm." Does a paper cut constitute harm? How about elective surgery (with the small but very real possibility of something going wrong on the operating table)? What about emotional harm? Taken to its logical extreme (and Asimov's robots are nothing if not logical), the First Law seems like it ought to require robots to do everything in their power to keep humans from ever doing anything dangerous, regardless of the humans' own wishes. Asimov never deals with this, either, but Jack Williamson tackles it head-on in his brilliant and nightmarish story "With Folded Hands." (For the Star Trek fans in the audience, the original series also address this issue, in a much more light-hearted vein, in "I, Mudd.")

So those are the biggest problems with the Three Laws, as far as I can see. But it doesn't end there. Because, much later in his career, Asimov introduced yet another law, one that certain extraordinary robots were able to develop for themselves. He called it the "Zeroth Law": A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. As might be surmised by its numbering, this law was given precedence over the other three, being deemed more fundamental and important than even the preservation of individual human lives. Now, the way Asimov presents this, it's all very noble and moral, and his robotic hero applies it in a gentle and benevolent fashion. But there's no reason to assume that must be the case, and there are some very disturbing possible implications to the Zeroth Law, especially when combined with the aforementioned fuzzy definitions of "injure" and "harm." For instance, given humanity's problems with pollution, over-population, war, etc., etc., might it not, from a strictly logical point of view, be argued that the best way to preserve humanity might be to cull out 95% of us and stick the rest on nature preserves? And, really, how many atrocities have humans propagated based on the firm belief that what they were doing was in the ultimate best interests of humanity as a whole, and that that noble goal far outweighed the value placed on individual human life? This is scary, scary stuff, and I really don't think (as Asimov perhaps did) that the fact that robots are clear-headed and unemotional is going to render them exempt from this kind of response. "Garbage in, garbage out" is one of the oldest precepts of computer science, and all it takes is the right sort of faulty or biased input and you're right back to homicidal rampages and world domination plans.

So, um, yeah. Those are my thoughts on Asimov's Laws of Robotics. Anybody who's actually read this far have anything they'd like to add?

How About That?

Hey, July's finally over!