Tetherd Cow Ahead

It’s truly Science Week here on The Cow.

It’s not often that you happen on the words ‘pig brain mist’ in a sentence, and so when the headline of an article is ‘Is Pig Brain Mist Linked to Mystery Ailment?’, you know it’s a must read. But before you do read on, a warning: the following might make you even more nauseous than the notion of a Pork Martini.

From this week’s New Scientist:

WORKERS at two pork-processing plants in the US have developed a mysterious nervous ailment after using compressed air to blast brain tissue from severed pig heads. The end product is a pink food paste that is canned and exported, but the process also generates an aerosol of brain matter that workers may inhale… Neurologist Daniel Lachance of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, suspects that this is the result of autoimmune damage triggered by immune reactions to proteins from the pig brains.

I’m not quite sure which concept makes me gag more: the pink food paste, or the aerosol of brain matter. I’m developing a mysterious nervous ailment simply by reading about it.

___________________________________________________________________________

…and I wonder if Dr Lachance has considered that merely the act of blasting brains out of severed porcine heads is enough, in itself, to give someone a serious nervous ailment. Or nightmares at the very least. Maybe if the workers sang to take their minds off their troubles…

OK. So that’s not really gonna help with the nightmares.

___________________________________________________________________________

A very average artist’s impression of Titan

This from NASA this morning:

Carolina Martinez 818-354-9382
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

NEWS RELEASE: 2008-025 Feb. 13, 2008

Titan’s Surface Organics Surpass Oil Reserves on Earth

Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.

I bet George Bush is already cooking up some pretext on which he can invade.

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff lately about people (mainly Japanese people, it has to be said) extolling the virtues of the imminent Robot Revolution. I’m sure you all saw scientists at Tokyo’s Waseda University recently wheeling out their Twendy-one, a kind of home-help robot designed for aged-care, and last year Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University was appearing all over the media with his ‘actroids’, including the odd ventriloquist-doll-like ReplieeQ1 who is variously described as ‘scarily realistic’ and ‘scarily life-like’ but seems to me just plain ‘scarily scary‘.*

I’m not too impressed about the idea of robots getting to be all pally with us, despite the enthusiasm coming out of Nippon. As much as I really loved the concept of our funky metal friends when I was a kid watching The Jetsons and Lost in Space, I’ve seen the future of robotic intrusion into our lives, and I just know that if our destiny is going to involve robots, I’m much more likely to be teaming up with Magnus, Robot Fighter than with little Jimmy Sparks.

I am, of course, extrapolating from the way robots currently ‘help’ us with our affairs. I’m sure you’ve tangled with the ‘proto-bots’ too, but let me elaborate.

Telstra, Australia’s biggest telco, has had in operation for a while now for our convenience, a voice-recognition fembot to handle incoming calls. I often find myself having to call Telstra and I have come to dread the experience. This is how my conversation with this artificial ‘intelligence’ typically proceeds (try to imagine a sing-songy overly-chummy female voice for the fembot):

Fembot: Welcome to Telstra. So that I can direct your call to the right place, in just a few words please tell me the reason for your call.

Me: Incorrect charges on my bill.

Fembot: That would be about a single bill? Does that sound OK?

Me: What? A single bill? What does that mean?

Fembot: I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that. Let’s try again. In just a few words, tell me the reason for your call.

Me: You’ve charged me for calls I didn’t make. Again.

Fembot: I think there could be faults or problems with your phone, does that sound OK?

Me: No!

Fembot: And is that for a mobile?

Me: What? No. It’s not a mobile.

Fembot: Can you give me the number of the mobile?

Me: It’s not a mobile!

Fembot: And what number would that mobile be?

Me (grrr): I want to talk to an operator.

Fembot: So that I can direct your call, please tell me in a few words the reason for your call.

Me: Aaaaargh! Operator. Operator. Give me a human. Operator. Operator. Operator.

Fembot: OK, please wait and I’ll get a customer service representative.

When the human comes online, we are invariably able to sort the problem out in seconds.

How many things do I resent about talking to the fembot? For a start, I despise the way it assumes a cloak of intelligence and power right from the get-go. By giving the impression that it has some kind of control over what it offers to be able to do for me, it looks all the more moronic for not being able to understand the most basic of syntax; I am phoning to try and sort out a problem and find that I’m immediately talking to an IDIOT. Let me ask you: if you were setting up a business, how likely is it that you go out and hire the stupidest person you could find, and then put them on the switchboard? Well, it’s worse than that.

Next, I loathe the maladroit attempt by the programmers to make the fembot appear chummy. Gone is the stilted computer formant voice of yesterday, replaced now with a studied, efficient-but-friendly, carefully modulated, fluid female phrasing that manages to come across as simultaneously condescending and obsequious. The sing-song inflections are reminiscent of the way someone might speak to a very young child, and the colloquial tone (Does that sound OK?) is merely grating and infuriating when intoned by a gadget whose nearest relative is a talking clock. At least when you got the phoneme-retarded cut-up voices of the past you were comprehensively aware that it was a clunky computer trick that you were dealing with.

But most of all I am maddened by the fact that every time I call I am completely unable to resist being drawn into talking to the damn thing as if it was an actual person, and wasting a good minute or so getting exactly to where I should have been at ‘Hello’.

The technicians who build these machines have got it in their heads that if they make them more people-like, we will accept them more easily, but for me, at least, the closer these things come to having the semblance of humanness, the greater is my desire to punch them. And, in contrast to the way I might deal with a real human idiot, there’s really no moral reason to curb that inclination.

This is what I fear about the coming of the real Robots. At least when the android is separated from me by a phone line, the most I can do is yell at the damn thing (which, I might add, I have done on numerous occasions).† But if Robo was in arm’s reach, then I swear, the word robocide will enter the lexicon faster than you can say klaatu barada nikto. This of course would necessitate the invention of laws. Not as Mr Asimov supposed, Three Laws designed to stop robots from harming humans, but instead, a single Law to stop humans turning robots into boat anchors.

This explains, at least, why they’re practising with robots in aged care: lowered retaliation factor. Better to send the droids up against feeble old folks than aspiring Magnuses.

It’s obvious though, that the boffins, as much as they might know all the ins & outs of their mechanical friends, don’t have even the vaguest concept about aged care. I’m just itching to watch the first practical tests when they send ReplieeQ17 in to deal with some old codger with dementia. I expect it to go something like this:

RQ17: Hello Mr ÄŒapek. I am here to prepare your breakfast. In just a few words, tell me what you would like?

Old Codger: You say what, young fella?

RQ17: I’m sorry I missed that, let’s try it again. Can you tell me, in just a few words, what you would like for breakfast?

Old Codger: Breakfast? Breakfast? What happened to lunch?

RQ17: Would that be oatmeal and fruit? Does that sound OK?

Old Codger (hits robot with cane): Are you trying to steal my money?!

RQ17: Did you say “my money is missing”?

Old Codger: YOU STOLE MY MONEY!

RQ17: I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Would you like to report a robbery? Does that sound right?

Old Codger: There’s something wrong with your face. Are you a Chinaman? Where’s my breakfast anyway?

RQ17: In just a few words, tell me what you would like for breakfast and I will prepare it for you.

Old Codger: A Chinaman stole my money! I knew it!

Well, you get the drift.

Personally, when all’s said and done, if it really is necessary to have a Robot Revolution, I want my robots to look and act like robots. If there’s a problem, I don’t need some kind of creepy pseudo-human standing there and negotiating with me. I just want a big clunky tin can filled with flashing lights, wobbling the claws on the end of its vacuum-cleaner arms, and blurting out in a grating metallic voice:‘Warning! Warning Will Robinson!’

___________________________________________________________________________

*Hiroshi Ishiguro has also created Geminoid HI-1, a robot that looks exactly like himself. Well, exactly like himself if he was a spastically jerking animatronic life-size doll.

†I’m not alone in this it would seem. Current research into voice recognition systems for handling telephone enquiry lines is examining ways to extract ’emotional’ tones from callers’ voices in an effort to recognize unhappy campers. Presumably these callers are then somehow dealt with differently to people stupid patient enough to play footsie with the robots.

A special thanks to Pete at Headless Hollow for the Magnus scan. I grew up reading Magnus comics and I really loved the wacky robots-gone-amok future that they suggested.

___________________________________________________________________________

I guess you all undoubtedly know by now that on January 29th we are not going to be wiped out by Asteroid 2007 TU24. Well, so NASA tells us anyway. As cosmic events go, though, it is a very near thing, with the asteroid skimming the Earth by a mere 1.4 Lunar Distances whisker.

So just how safe should we really feel? The Near Earth Object Program has posted a mugshot of the perp as evidence that they are in full control of the situation:

Oh yeah. That’s convincing. Hands up who would have picked that out in a line-up as an asteroid? Do you all feel re-assured that it’s all scientific-like and these guys really know what they’re doing? With that kind of ‘proof’ you could claim anything:

And what if they did their calculations wrong? Like, for instance using imperial measurements instead of metric?

Nah. It’s NASA! These are egg-brain geniuses! They wouldn’t make a mistake as dumb as that.

Would they?

As we stumble flat-footed but indisputably well-endowed into 2008, China tries frantically to get Beijing ready for the 2008 Olympic Games. It is by now becoming apparent that it has a mighty long way to go before it can face up to the ongoing criticism of the West and make a dent in its massive pollution problem. A lot has been written already about the country’s choking air quality, eclipsing, perhaps, some less obvious concerns.

Here at Cow Central, we have it on good authority that the Chinese Government has taken cunning measures to deal with other kinds of contamination, and our TCA Special Correspondent, operating deep behind enemy lines, wandering around the shops at Christmas, has uncovered a fiendish Chinese scheme to offload solid toxic waste onto an unsuspecting West; worse than that, even: a Machiavellian plot to deliver their atramentous filth into the hands of innocent children!

Allow me to elaborate. Inevitably, at this time of year, a shopper finds him/herself dawdling into the precincts of the now-ubiquitous ‘Two Dollar Shop’.* All manner of zany gadgets and trinkets seem to find their way into these places, and a Christmas visit here is almost mandatory for the acquisition of that kooky little ‘something’ to give to the special someone in your life.

This year, TCA’s Man On The Street brought our attention to the Two Dollar Shop item (masquerading as a ‘toy’) pictured above: a small plastic drum with the word ‘Caution’ stencilled on it. Or, more accurately, a whole box full of the damn things! A check at ‘Price World’ in my own neck of the woods uncovers a similar trove. Given the pervasive nature of the Two Dollar Shop, we may conclude that there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of these little black barrels arriving on our shores every week! There is no doubt at all where they originate:

The fiends are so brazen that they don’t make even the slightest attempt to cover their tracks! Now, as I cautiously open the lid and allow you to examine the contents, I will understand completely if you tremble with fear as the full understanding of this dastardly plot dawns upon you!

Yes, my friends, not only are they very effectively getting rid of their foul effluvium, but they’ve concocted a racket where we actually buy it from them! And then pass it on to our kids, in the guise of a carefree play item, so that they may absorb it through their skin, thereby creating a new generation of hideous yet feeble mutants addicted to glitzy flashing lights and the smell of rarified hydrocarbons…

Sure, China gives the appearance of a massively uncoordinated country bravely attempting to shake off the stigma of the Third World and march proudly into a Shiny Capitalist Future, but I say BEWARE! Remember these people invented the word inscrutable!†

Today the Olympic Games, tomorrow The World!

(If I mysteriously disappear anytime soon, I ask only that name be recorded on a monument on Manhattan Island in the future world capital New Shanghai, along with the words ‘I told you so’).

___________________________________________________________________________

*I am speculating that there is an equivalent to this phenomenon in other countries; pokey little shops packed densely with shelving that offers all manner of cheap, usually Chinese-made, junk. In Australia, the shops go by such monikers as ‘Buy Rite’, ‘Price World’, ‘Bargain Zone’ or ‘Reject Shop’ but are universally known here as ‘Two Dollar Shops’. I actually really love the Two Dollar Shops because they are a reminder of the kind of corner-store I grew up with as a kid. I am fully aware that their cheap flashy plastic gew-gaws probably represent the exploitation of poor Chinese peasants and the plundering of fragile ecosystems.

†Well, OK, it’s an English word so they probably didn’t invent it. But I bet they have a Chinese word that means pretty much the same thing. And I bet they use it often, followed by a sinister laugh.

___________________________________________________________________________