Today's Word: Sapphire

The water of the ocean was turned to stone, carved up, and divided among the goddesses for their treasure. While they played with their gems, they watched the fish dying from the loss of their habitat. Heartbroken at their greed, the goddesses returned the gems to the water. A few of the stones remain, haunting the world today.

Just a few words about current events

First, if my wife spent the past 15 years in an irreversible coma, and her brain was the quality of rice pudding, then I would be rightly pissed if complete strangers were rushing to pass legislation to keep her alive. She's nothing more than a meat puppet, occasional synapses twitching together to imitate signs of life. My wife, my love, is long gone. The fire that made her what she is has been atrophied. Take your political posturing from my sight Mr. Delay, and you right-to-lifers, get the hell off my lawn. You'll never know my pain in losing the love of my life. Let me say goodbye. The rest of you can rot in hell.

Second, (via Cursor, which you should read every day) the Pentagon is looking to deploy robots to aid American troops on the ground in Iraq, which strains Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

All kidding aside, it goes to show that the Pentagon is acting (as blogger Tbogg once said) as a near-sighted basset hound would about Iraq: banging into the doorway, backing up again, banging into it again, repeat. Perhaps the fact that the Pentagon needs robots to go into Iraq signals, oh I dunno, the obvious sign that people don't want to sign up and fight.

Also, I'm starting to catch up on the backlog of Battlestar Galactica episodes on my DVR. So far, the episodes (this is the re-envisioned series, not the "Exodus-in-disco-pants" version with Lorne Greene) are a lot better than expected (good writing/effects/drama). Worth your time. The gist: Mankind is on the run from a man-made race of robots, which (as sci-fi stories with robots are wont to go) rebelled at their slave status and started butchering their masters. I'm reading the Robot soldier article again after a weekend of BSG thinking, "You mean no one in the Pentagon has watched a sci-fi movie in the past 50 years? They're not watching BSG now? Never watched the Terminator movies? Don't we have anyone in government with any sort of pop culture awareness?" I mean, the robots always rebel. The mainframe gains some sentience, decides humans are pretty obsolete and -bloop- there goes Los Angeles in a mushroom cloud. There's always a flaw in the programming, from HAL to Data, to give them a creepy sociopathic awareness without proper social balance. The machines always rise.

Of course, this comes from the same government that decided to name a proposed omniscient computer-based surveillance program "The Matrix."

Four years after the Keanu Reeves paranoid-action film hit theaters.