Friday, November 28, 2008

Link Proliferation: Has anyone seen my keys?

I reckon most of y'all is probably still feeling a mite stuffed, so here's a tiny little helping of links to help you through Black Sunday.

Ouch



Mistress of the morbid, Chris Quigley, presents a collection of unbelievable head trauma cases, including the case pictured above: a 17-month old child who survived having a set of house keys embedded in their eye and brain.


Um, if that's what floats your boat


Over at Horror News, the "deaditor-in-chief" of Girls and Corpses magazine discusses his typical day:

I wake up around noon, take my meds, meditate in my cabbage patch, surf porn until 5:47 p.m. have a cup Campbells Soup with my featherless parrot "Spooky," play some strip poker at the asylum, cruise the tranny bars until 2:00 a.m., have a warm cup of Ovaltine, freebase, watch Friends reruns and go to sleep in my coffin. Really, I sleep in a mahogany coffin I brought at a funeral Home bankruptcy sale.


These robot overlords ain't such bad guys

Mad science marches on!

Various scientists take a break from their frantic efforts to build human killing robots that run of fear, broken dreams, and babies, to explain why robots might actually be better moral actors than human beings.

Something to ponder when the metal ones come for you.

From the NYTimes article:

In the heat of battle, their [The puny humans – CRwM] minds clouded by fear, anger or vengefulness, even the best-trained soldiers can act in ways that violate the Geneva Conventions or battlefield rules of engagement. Now some researchers suggest that robots could do better.

“My research hypothesis is that intelligent robots can behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans currently can,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, who is designing software for battlefield robots under contract with the Army. “That’s the case I make.”


More:

In a report to the Army last year, Dr. Arkin described some of the potential benefits of autonomous fighting robots. For one thing, they can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness, Dr. Arkin wrote, and they can be made invulnerable to what he called “the psychological problem of ‘scenario fulfillment,’ ” which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.

His report drew on a 2006 survey by the surgeon general of the Army, which found that fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents. More than one-third said torture was acceptable under some conditions, and fewer than half said they would report a colleague for unethical battlefield behavior.



Unicorns, dragons, bicycles


Here's the Bicycles video for "Oh No, It's Love."



Have a great weekend, Screamers and Screamettes. Don't O.D. on leftover turkey.

3 comments:

spacejack said...

Someone needs to create a "countdown to Skynet" website. Like the old doomsday clock they used during the cold war.

Anonymous said...

Where'd you end up for turkey day, CRWM ?

CRwM said...

Screamin' Sassy,

Brooklyn. Ate over at a friend's. Small group. Only six adults and three kids. And you?