The Old Dog Barks

I saw this at Alphecca with a link to the Fox News story — Jeff at Alphecca says:

“No “Pledge” at Massachusetts School”
“I personally know teachers who would think such a policy is sick. There ARE some good, some great, patriotic educators out there. Just not at this garbage can school:”

When Sean Harrington entered his freshman year at Arlington High School, he noticed something peculiar: There were no American flags in the classrooms, and no one recited the Pledge of Allegiance.
So Harrington enlisted the aid of his fellow students, and now, three years later, they have succeeded in getting flags installed in the classrooms. But the pledge still will not be recited.
The Arlington, Mass., school committee has rejected the 17-year-old’s request to allow students to voluntarily recite the Pledge of Allegiance, because some educators are concerned that it would be hard to find teachers willing to recite it, according to a report in the Arlington Patch.

My comment was: “Unbelievable! Well it would have been at one time. Don’t these “educators” understand how this makes them look to most of us? And even if the teachers won’t recite it — that is no reason to stop the students from doing so.”

“Even as I think saying the Pledge should not be mandatory, I think there needs to be an update to the phrase “…for which it stands…”, it seems like this needs to be changed to “…for which it once stood…”

“I wonder if the school committee would let it be said with the edit?”

It has been a month since Daniel Foster wrote this but maybe he has a point.

June 2, 2010 4:00 A.M.

Nuke It?

It’s a little less crazy than it sounds.

It was September of 1966, and gas was gushing uncontrollably from the wells in the Bukhara province of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. But the Reds, at the height of their industrial might, had a novel solution. They drilled nearly four miles into the sand and rock of the Kyzyl Kum Desert, and lowered a 30-kiloton nuclear warhead — more than half-again as large as “Little Boy,” the crude uranium bomb dropped over Hiroshima — to the depths beneath the wellhead. With the pull of a lever, a fistful of plutonium was introduced to itself under enormous pressure, setting off the chain reaction that starts with E = MC2 and ends in Kaboom! The ensuing blast collapsed the drill channel in on itself, sealing off the well.

The Soviets repeated the trick four times between 1966 and 1979, using payloads as large as 60 kilotons to choke hydrocarbon leaks. Now, as the Obama administration stares into the abyss of the Deepwater Horizon spill, and a slicker of sweet, medium crude blankets the Gulf of Mexico, slouching its way toward American beaches and wetlands, Russia’s newspaper of record is calling on the president to consider this literal “nuclear option.”

If the containment wells fail this will be something to think about.

A few weeks back I posted on a robot conducting a wedding between two humans. Now I read about where it is leading. From this months 40th Anniversary Issue of Smithsonian I find this:

Married, With Glitches

Will human-robot interactions be undone by technical difficulties?
By Bruce McCall
Smithsonian magazine, August 2010

“My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots.”
— Artificial intelligence researcher David Levy
— Maastricht University

From The American Journal of Annulment and Divorce
June 2053

UNDERLYING CAUSES OF HUMAN-ROBOT MARITAL DISCORD
In the first major study undertaken since the passage of the Automaton Marriage Act of 2050, questionnaires distributed to 125 recently divorced couples have yielded the following findings:

PART I
Humans tire of their robot mates almost three times faster than robots tire of humans.
1. The key reasons cited by humans for dissatisfaction with robots are:
— “That infernal humming.”
— Stench of overheated or burning electrical wires, especially during lovemaking.
— Robots can’t go in the water, limiting family vacation options.
— Simple maintenance regimen among robots (software upgrades, frequent oil changes) spawns corrosive resentment in flesh-and-blood partners.
— Robots refuse to perform household chores, citing “degrading leftover stereotypes dating back to crude 2010-era robot clichés.”

2. Robots disenchanted with human spouses list three primary causes:
— Human minds comparatively slow and sluggish, with limited memory and frequent lapses; need to use pen/pencil even for simple E=mc2 calculations.
— The human need to eat and sleep creates “hopeless” scheduling incompatibilities.
— Snoring.

There is no stopping it, to take a page (the title actually), from John Derbyshire’s book, “We are all Doomed!”