perfidy

See? This guy gets it. Even though Pittsburgh is doomed in the event of zombie infestatation, it seems that someone there is aware of the impending threat to humankind posed by the robots. Although the article in question and the gentleman's book, titled "How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion," is about robots generally, the information contained therein certainly applies to space robots as well.

"Any robot could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator, and so it is crucial to learn the strengths and weaknesses of every robot enemy," author Daniel H. Wilson warns in "How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion."

What makes the book cool -- and unlike some other survival books -- is that Wilson is an actual roboticist, who got his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon last month. While his scenarios are outlandish -- describing attacks by humanoid robots, some of them with creepy tails, some that can climb walls or swim -- the research on how to build and attack the robot creatures is quite real.

*snip*

Some of the features of these service bots can be found in a robotic dog named Aibo
From the get-go, Wilson's 178-page book is clearly for the humor section; the graphics give it away with pictures of old school video-game robots zapping humans with lasers. It's riddled with B-movie language about "the nefarious robot mind" and survival tips that are closer to "The Onion" than a science book. (A tip for telling whether a new acquaintance is a real person or a humanoid robot: "Does your friend smell like a brand-new soccer ball?")

Some of the tips are real.

A robot trying to find you will use thermal imaging based on the roughly 91-degree temperature of human skin, so smearing yourself in cool mud will confuse them. If being chased by an unmanned robot vehicle, flee to a rustic, unmapped area with lots of obstacles. If your robot "smart" house -- one wired with video surveillance and computer gear -- tries to trap you, chop your way out with an ax and don't take your cell phone, because the house will track you with it.

Wilson hatched the idea for the book in the Squirrel Hill Cafe, better known as the Squirrel Cage, less well known as the place where they used to have a bottle of rye whiskey just for me. That place makes you wicket smaaaaht, let me tell ya.

The Ministry implores all readers to support Mr. Wilson in his efforts to educate humanity. That is all.

If I ever find the guy who crapped in my Wheaties this morning, he will be, in the immortal words of Walter Sobchak, entering a world of pain.

Holy crap. I swear I never thought I would be saying something like this right out loud (I might have to turn in my fellow traveler card to the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy), but some things just aren't right. One is the current initiative in my fair Commonwealth, known unfairly by its detractors as Taxachusetts, to let the children of illegal immigrants attend state colleges at in-state resident tuition levels.

State Attorney General (and likely Democratic candidate for Governator) Tom Reilly is pushing this plan as part of his campaign bid. And now our Lieutenant Governer, Republican Kerry Healy, is getting crap for saying something about it.

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Not in a million years. That's my tax money. That I pay because I live here legally.

Now, I'm not a close-the-borders kind of guy. Immigration is what made this country great (that plus strategic genocide, but I'm not, really not in favor of repeating that part of our history), and I like it a lot when the best and brightest - or the most desperate and resourceful - from around the world come to our shores in search of a piece o' whatever makes them happy. And maybe our immigration policies need a bunch of work to make it easier for people to be documented and cleared to enter, and maybe the slugs at the Department of Homeland Security who are responsible for visas and such could stop trying to make life as hard as possible for all supplicants at their grubby Formica altars. I agree. We need to get on that.

But in the meantime, we need to do something about the people here illegally. Yes, I know our economy could grind to a halt if we sent everyone home en masse. But guess what? The answer to that conundrum is not to decide the rules are meaningless. By "do something," I mean 'figuring out how to more efficiently police our borders,' 'how to more efficiently screen guest workers such as seasonal produce pickers,' 'how to streamline the visa process,' and so on. "Something" is not giving away tuition breaks to the chidren of illegals. Do that, and the difference between legal and illegal immigration becomes less and less meaningful. If you get a drivers' license (such as California proposes) and in-state tuition, why ever go to the goons at DHS to plead your case?

I get where the impulse comes from. The kids, it's likely, aren't generally here of their own volition; they haven't broken immigration laws independently of the authority of their parents. This is America, after all, and people deserve a shot. If they're bright, we can use them. Now that they're here, sure, it would be nice if they got smart and educated, and stayed in the Bay State as hardworking, aboveboard and upright legal aliens. That's a nice idea.

But until the day they get their visa or their green card, it's also bullshit.

Folks, this shit ain't right. This is, or usedta be, America.

[wik] Like John McCain said,

"I hold no brief for the prisoners. I do hold a brief for the reputation of the United States of America. We are Americans, and we hold ourselves to humane standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they may be. To do otherwise undermines our security, but it also undermines our greatness as a nation. We are not simply any other country. We stand for something more in the world – a moral mission, one of freedom and democracy and human rights at home and abroad. We are better than these terrorists, and we will we win. The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don’t deserve our sympathy. But this isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies. "

In the immortal words of the Original Rube (one of my many avatars), fuckin' A, dude.

That was a 589 word snippet. I'm editing the next eight hundred or so. Don't worry though, I won't be commenting like this throughout the whole novel, though I will occasionally - and probably in greater depth as I writhe in the agonies of procrastination. Like now.

There are currents in space more subtle than those in any ocean. The glimmering of the Milky Way and a hundred billion stars only teases the mind with light, but does not light the way. Through the darkness coasts a ship, call it that though it has no crew. It has mind, which is the ship. A mind that once hunted through dark waters but now hunts different prey, with different senses.

Tenuous wisps of gas so thin that more than a single molecule in a cubic meter counts as dense brush the skin of the ship. Mind feels gentle tugging currents of electromagnetic fields, and the pull of a stars years in the distance. Far behind, mind senses the mother ship, and the humans who brought it across a gulf of years for vengeance. Hours to the side are its podmates, searching and seeking. Sniffing and listening but silent in the deep just as mind is.

Light impinges on delicate sensors, lightly aged and with the flavor of metal and machine. Prey. Mind touches a part of its sensorium, activating the ansible causal channel back to the mother. Entangled quantum particles separated at birth, each knowing what happens to other no matter the distance between them. An ever dwindling pool of communication, instantaneous and unreadable. Once consumed in the act of communication, the causal channel is nothing but a useless bit of entropy.

message-id: [7533020.1114066576010].
date: 20 apr 2105 23:56:15 -0700 - [relative].
from: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
to: unif/ussconstitution/tacops/weps [mother].
subject: hey...
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 512bit.
authenticator: 2a21.24e4.5bb.234/word of the day is euphonious.
message reads:
new contact.
designate oscar-5.
range ~81mclicks/4.5lmin.
[attachment: sensor take mission time 05:01:79]
prelim:
target acquisition due to poor target emission control. (.78 probable)
‘civilian’ vessel/habitat (.56 probable)
orders?

Mind waits, knowing what the answer will be. It is always the same. It misses the hunting songs it sang in a long distant ocean. A living mind instantiated in a quantum foam computing matrix (with the small bit of living flesh without which Mind would not exist) cannot sing, except to itself. Mind coasts through the silent darkness.

Mind focuses on the passive sensor arrays layered on its nose. Designed and crafted atom by atom to drink in any light no matter what its frequency, the arrays give both sight and stealth. Running powered almost completely down, mind emits very little heat, and that shunted carefully backward, excreted in dribbles of infrared photons from folded fractal heat exchangers.

Mind listens, attentive to the emissions from oscar-5. There is no sense to them, nothing intelligible or decipherable, at least not to mind’s inboard expert systems. But the flavor… It tastes like softness, carelessness. Low microwave emissions, sideband emanations from insufficiently shielded devices. Leaky internal communications? The enemy, talking to itself knowing that someone is listening yet unable to maintain disciplined silence.

A tickle from the ansible. Mind turns its attention to the incoming message queue.

message-id: [OF8D833F44.C4FCE053-ON85256FE7.0047217E].
date: 20 apr 2105 00:01:30 -0430 - [relative].
from: unif/ussconstitution/tacops/weps [mother].
to: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
subject: re: hey...
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 512bit.
authenticator: 2f8.2cc.b52.254/word of the day is niggardly.
message reads:
confirm local analysis.
track new contact oscar-5, pursue to termination.
softkill, maintain emcon.
new taskgroup 14/7, your lead, hk-32/hk-57/hk-59/mb-02 seconded.
upload softkill intel via mb-02 ansiblelink.
be alert for other habs, lurkers. good hunting, baby.

Mind sends ansible pings to its new podmates, gaining and giving position coordinates and relative vectors. A brief flurry of transmissions establish roles and timetables. Incremental genocide to proceed at their earliest convenience.

***

Today is day one of a month of enjoyable hell. Or miserable heaven. Or... something. I have just under 30 days from this moment to complete a 50,000 word novel. EDog is the son of a bitch who got me hooked on this idea. So I, and perhaps you, have him to blame. In the meantime, go read his second National Novel Writing Month effort, Propane Jockeys. John from Texas Best Grok is also participating in the madness - check out his efforts as well.

I am an innovative procrastinator. For starters, I'm writing this post. Also, I haven't come up with a name for my novel larva. So, once everyone has had a chance to read a bit of what I'm going to post, submit title suggestions in the comments.

As I was preparing to post the first chunk of my magnum opus, I realized with horror that I didn't have a category for my novel posts. This led to almost an hour of web searching, photoshopping and web admining, and so I can no present to you our new Perfidious category, NaNoWriMo. Click on that link, or the category link in the left toolbar, and you will be able to access all of my novel related posts. Or, just watch for the watch icon on new posts, and you'll know that during novel writing month, there is only one time, and that is too late.

The first chunk should be up shortly, and more later this evening. I'm going to try to get to the required average speed of 1667 words a day for the first week, then pick up the pace because I know I'm going to be wicked short of time come Thanksgiving.

I hope you enjoy it.

Been listening to music, lately...and thought I'd share the list, because of the deep window this provides into my life.

• Feeder: Pushing the Senses -- What can I say? Yet another masterpiece from the best rock band hardly anybody in the US has heard of. You must go straight to Amazon and spend crazy money on finding their CDs.
• Let's Go: Let's Go -- Great straight-up melodic pop-rock. Handsome without the bitter metal.
• Fluke: Puppy -- You might know track 3 from the last Matrix movie (remember the big dance/orgy scene prior to the big battle?). The rest of the CD is great, pounding rhythms and melodies, and some of the best arpeggiated electronics I've heard in a while. Closes with the unexpectedly beautiful Blue Sky -- a kind of electronic/gospel hybrid.
• Coldplay: X&Y -- Yeah, me and everybody else. It's good enough to deserve it.
• Mercuy Rev: The Secret Migration -- I've known this band to be a critic's favorite for a while but never picked anything up. Good, melodic progressive, with Zero 7 overtones in places.
• Morel: Lucky Strike -- DC native (I think ;) Richard Morel creates another dark dance/pop thinker. Driving dance beats, brutal lyrics, Pink Noise (Deep Dish) production...there's much to like here. First listen makes you think it's just another dance record, but the unusually beautiful melodies hit you, and then the words hit you like a sledgehammer. Not for everyone, but it should be.
• Royksopp: The Undertanding -- Simply brilliant electronica from these Scandinavian geniuses. They forge through new territory with this release (as with their last), but the results never stop being musical and never stop being accessible.
• Orbital: Blue Album -- Orbital's last, so they say, and relatively satisfying. Can't say I'd give it top marks, but there are a couple of standouts that make the CD worth buying. In particular I love You Lot's sampled speech:

You, are becoming Gods. There's a new master of creation, and it's you! Unraveled DNA and at the same time youre cultivating bacteria strong enough to kill every living thing. Do you think you are ready for that much power. You lot ? You lot?! Cheeky b**tards. You're running around science like kids with guns, creating a new world, while you've got is stinking, but, hands up, hands up anyone who thinks you've got it right. Yea there's always one. I can see you. If you want the position of God then take the responsibility

Bush nominated Sam Alito for the Supreme Court. Conservatives will be happy, as Alito is one of the elect - his name is on the consensus list of acceptable candidates for the court. By nominating Scalito, Bush will bring the wandering sheep back into the fold. We'll have to see whether the Democrats flip their lid over this nomination. Offhand, I don't see how they can, as it seems pretty much everyone is in agreement that the man has the juice for the post. Any opposition will likely be purely ideological.

For my part, I'm cool with this one. From Jonathan Turley on MSNBC:

In addition, Alito has written a very controversial dissent in a case involving the ownership of machine guns, suggesting that a statute prohibiting such things might be unconstitutional.

Conservatives have kicked the commies to the curb in Poland. However, the two parties that together garnered a majority of the votes fell out over distribution of high-level posts in the new government. But hey, at least the commies are out.