The World of Stuff .com

Two years

It’s been a tough question deciding when I actually started to blog. I consider today, August 4, the anniversary of the day I began blogging. I had been posting about updates to the site since it began in April 2003, and in July I asked “To blog or not to blog?” and answered in the negative. But in the next post I declared that “I’ve decided I’m going to go ahead with it anyway. Soon.” The post after that, on August 4, 2003, wasn’t really different from the others, but in it I did refer to the site as “a blog-type thing.” So there you go. August 4, 2003.

You surely have heard about that recently-unveiled Japanese robot that looks oh-so realistic. According to that article, one of the scientists who made it “says one day robots could fool us into believing they are human.”

Oh, those androids. They will improve our lives, the scientists say. They will do the things we don’t want to do ourselves, like… make a sandwich. Or… change the channel when the remote’s broken. We’ll live happily ever after. Right?

We can’t go wasting our time making robots. Eventually, as this guy says, robots will be so realistic that we’ll be hard-pressed to tell them from real humans. And then what? Then we’ll have sacks of sprockets running around masquerading as actual people. What if you take a robot home from the bar? What if a robot runs for President? Don’t we have enough people already?

Worst of all, with more realistic robots come smarter robots. The robots of ten years ago can hardly compare to today’s android. Imagine how intelligent robots will be in 2015. And 2025. And 2035. Eventually, we’re going to make them smarter than ourselves, or at least able to become so.

What I’m getting at here is that by wasting our time with this robot stuff, we’re basically planning the demise of humankind. Eventually the robots will take over, kill us all, and multiply. And I can’t be the only one who believes this.

What part of Ask Jordon don’t you understand?

Tom: My new house in Buffalo is almost done being built and we need help moving. Can I count you in?

Umm… sure. As long as you let me live in the basement. That would be fun. We don’t have them here. Four cool points to basements.

debbie: what is the name of the airport in jordon

What do you think Ask Jordon is? Do you think you’re asking questions to an entire Middle Eastern country? Why don’t you just Google it? I’m sure there’s more than one airport in the nation of Jordan, anyway.

Years ago, I remember watching “Figure It Out,” a sort of game show where panelists had to guess a person’s talent by receiving various clues. One boy that I particularly remember was able to give the day of the week for any given date. I always wondered how he did that.

Then I found this site with a mathematical formula for determining the day of the week for a given Gregorian date. Last month, when I first found the site, I just barely managed to succeed in memorizing the formula. (Hey, I needed something to do while we were waiting in line for Dueling Dragons.) I also wrote a computer program that uses it. But I’ll have to re-commit the formula to memory and practice my mental math, because it sure is a killer party trick.