Sin and Science

Such weirdness going on.

Sleepy sent me an article from the Times online which shows that help is at hand for the NHS. A doctor at a Family Planning clinic is fully embracing alternative methods and suggested to a patient that she needed to consult a Catholic priest due to the fact that she was clearly possessed. Sadly for the doc, the patient wasn't as open minded and now the whole sorry shenanigans is in court. Amusingly, the doctor's name is Pratt.

I'm almost sorry that my upcoming trip to Blighty will be just too damned short to hop over to Düsseldorf and experience Marx's 'Das Kapital' the stage version. We are assured that not only is the production based on different people's takes on Marx's economic theories but that every performance will be subtly different. My mouth is positively watering. Seems as though audiences are less enthusiastic than I however and it isn't a sellout. Yet. Good news for me though.

Since I missed Bonfire Night, Sleepy also sent me an amusing account of one squaddie's prank which backfired. Mind you, how the hell it could ever not have backfired was more the question. He stuck a rocket in his bum and lit the blue touchpaper. Oddly, he was subsequently hospitalised.
I loved that 'safety experts' said this,
"....safety experts said yesterday that launching a rocket from the backside was a practice that contravened the firework code." So dry. Nicely done.

In more local news, a Synagogue in Vancouver objected to a women's gym opposite not having frosted glass, so that the worthies with the hats and the long curly hair going on were able to see women in sportswear provocatively exercising. For some reason, the lady's gym actually complied and frosted their glass, but then realised that they had insufficient light. You might have thought that the Hasidics who were already in need of enlightenment may have considered frosting their own glass.

The Japanese are scary people - sorry Raymond - but last night on the 'Daily Planet' we saw two robots being built in Japan. One was an actual android, although perhaps Fembot was the right word. The robot, whose skin was made of silicon to give it a more lifelike appearance really did have a lifelike appearance. That is if you know a young Japanese woman with large hands. An ongoing process was programming it with ever more human movements. Researchers reported that they had to treat it like a human too, if they did anything disrespectful to it, other workers got upset. The only drawback was that all these realistic movements were mediated by hydraulics, and the hydraulic power system was too large to be inside the body.

Meanwhile another robot which looked more like a pile of children's bricks that could be clicked together, were able to organise themselves both as individual units and within the whole, to overcome obstacles. At present, the researcher has to tell them the nature of the obstacle coming up and then it works out how to cope, but future bots will have sensors.

Between the two of them, we don't yet have Seven of Nine, but I'm sure somewhere, someone's working on it.