When I grow up I want to be a tugboat captain..

I was reading the Lancaster Sunday News on Sunday(surprise) when in the parade magazine they had their annual "What People Earn" report. In this report is a sampling of what different people earn(No rocket science here). Nurses Aids that earn in the thousands, lawyers that earn in the hundreds of thousands, and hedge fund managers in the hundreds of millions. That is when I saw it. Tugboat Captain 59,000 per year. What a great job, you get to play around on a boat all day, make almost 60k per year and to top it off, robots can't swim. Yes, when I grow up I want to be a tugboat captain. Plus you would get to wear a bad ass hat.

It's not funny, but at the same time it is kind of funny.

I wonder how long its been since the secretary of state of the United States of America had to express concern over pirates. I can't even type this without chuckling. Today the media reports on pirate attacks on boats that contain American citizens, tomorrow the mass hysteria will start. Rush Limbaugh will come on the radio and say anyone who dresses up as a pirate for halloween is "unpatriotic", he will ask for Johnny Depp to have his citizen ship revoked. Morons will listen. People will stage public events where "Pirates of the Caribbean" DVD's are run over with a steam roller, eye patches will be called "freedom patches". Congress will get together and send swashbucklers to internment camps for re-education. Then when the hysteria reaches a fever pitch, and when the 24 hour news networks are calling for retribution, the administration will act. We will attack England. They will say that England being the birthplace of perhaps the most famous pirate Blackbeard, was to blame. America needs an enemy.

America Home of the free Land of the... (plus robots)

We put more people in prison per capita than any other civilization in the world. Kind of ironic, no? I don't mean to go into a pseudo political tirade about the state of our union, but I found this to an interesting topic.




Approximately one in every 18 men in the United States is behind bars or being monitored.

So what would be the reason for this? I sure would like to know. Looking at Europe for example their rates are much lower than those in the US, yet US and Europe have similar overall crime rates, albeit we have a higher rate of murder per capita.

Why in the land of the free are so many not?

Now onto robots!

I got an anoymouse email tip last week with a link to an article about robts that think for themselves. Robots that are able to make scientific discoveries on their own, robots than can do experimets and form hypothesis. Robots that can do pharmaceutical research(wait what...?) Yup. Robots who hate you will soon be developing drugs.. drugs that will be used to kill you.

Excerpt:

At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that can not only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment.It is the world's first example of a machine that has made an independent scientific discovery -- in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of baker's yeast."On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we've checked that it's got the results correct," King said in an interview."People have been working on this since the 1960s. When we first sent robots to Mars, they really dreamt of the robots doing their own experiments on Mars. After 40 or 50 years, we've now got the capability to do that."Their next robot, Eve, will have much more brain power and will be put to work searching for new medicines.hate humans are soon going to be trusted to develop new drugs

Its funny its name is Adam, and the next one will be called Eve, and the principles of our destruction will bear the same name as the fabled first two humans god created in his own image. I'm sure my treadmill in the basement is very pleased, I am not and frankly I'm a little scared to go downstairs right now.