Kelly St. Clair

And now I'm a Star Trek joke.
(What do you mean, "now"?)

"Pfft, how hard can that be, any child can do that" - words that would haunt roboticists through the late 20th and 21st centuries. (The usual answer involves five years, a big grant, and a lot of researchers sitting in corners twitching.)

Consider "easy" tasks like "pick up the red ball, without dropping or crushing it, and throw it to this other person." (ohgod)

My resolution is simple:
Get through it.

yeah, that's where we are now.

"quick, do something! ... not that!"

Today I learned where "ipecac", as in syrup of - a word that a friend says always makes them think it's reversed or rot13d or something - actually comes from: a Central and South American plant, which means of course that its naming doesn't follow any of our rules. (By contrast, one of the alkaloids in it, "emetine", does exactly what you'd expect if you know any Greek and/or Latin; that is, blaaaaaarf.)

So here we have a plant which actually succeeds in making humans sick, as opposed to all the ones that we laugh at and say "nice try", then grind up and put on our food. But we've found another use for it - controlled self-poisoning to make the body expel other, potentially worse substances. (Or, as the article notes near the bottom, small doses to keep prisoners too nauseous and/or weak to cause trouble. Ick.)

(regarding yet another "Internet of Things" exploit)

[Meagen] You know the funny thing?
[Meagen] Back when people were predicting ubiquitous surveillance, it was a chilling thought because everyone sort of assumed it would be done *competently*.
[Meagen] I mean, if you wrote a dystopian sci-fi novel in the 90s and have your protagonist do this exact thing, people would've said it's unrealistic because who in the world would just make all cameras be unsecured internet access points?
[Meagen] I mean, hacking into a camera to make it turn off or tamper with its footage, sure.
[Meagen] But hacking into a bunch of cameras to use them as launch points for an attack on someone else? Come on. Why would cameras even be able to *do* that?
[PyroWork] Sad truth: The future doesn't belong to megacorps. It belongs to the technology equivalent of the double glazing firm.
[seebs] "double glazing firm"?
[PyroWork] They will sell you double glazing for your house!
[PyroWork] It will be installed wrong, and leak.
[PyroWork] When you attempt to seek remedy for this it will be to the discovery that the company does not actually exist anymore, but there is a new double glazing firm with a different name operating out of the same yard with the same phone number.
[PyroWork] They will also attempt to sell you double glazing.

So... I'm browsing sci fi shorts on youtube. And I came across one, set in the near future, where a woman is upset that her partner pays more attention to his augmented-reality overlay than her.
One of her complaints is that he takes pictures virtually, while she does it with an old Polaroid. She romanticizes the chemical process, the silver salts, the grain of the picture, claims that it has "life", etc.
Thing is, I'm old enough (just barely) to remember when instant cameras were the new thing to be sneered at. Now they're hip, retro, and authentic. Go figure.

(if you were really committed to your art, to the scene, you'd be grinding your own pigments and making your own canvas and brushes, not buying those from a store or, worse, letting a machine capture a sterile image for you at the touch of a button. :p )

Today's Google doodle reminds us that this would be the 384th birthday of that Dutch guy who squinted into a drop of water and discovered that absolutely everything is covered in BUGS bugs BUGS.

I haven't kept up with things D&D, so to speak, in years; my last solid point of contact was looking over the new books and noting the irony that, in an attempt to recapture market share, they were transforming the mechanics to make the game play more like the massively-popular computer games which were originally inspired by it. (Very snake-eating-its-own-tail, there.) I gather that a more recent edition has since dispensed with this and gone back to something more traditional, but that's about as much as I know.

But today, as a result of a friend's offhand mention of a bit of background from the official Pathfinder setting, I had cause to consult a wiki for same. And I was much amused, after a bit of wiki-walking, to learn that this fantasy world (yet another analogue for Earth, where the continents are differently shaped but all in the right places, and the cultures are likewise fictionalized but familiar) has had several starships crash-land on it.

It's so very Blackmoor, y'know? (See also Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, et al.) Forty years on, and we're still handing out laser pistols to barbarian warriors and having them make saving throws to point the right end at the monsters, some of which may be "metal men."