But What Of Earth?

It appears that I've been tagged by DWQ to do one or all of the following: list six unique or eight random facts about myself, or to list five thought-inspiring blogs. I think I'll go with eight random facts, as that seems like the easiest of the three options. I'm not sure I could come up with six truly unique facts about myself without moving into the realm of Too Much Information.

1. I dislike cilantro. Tasting it is like having a game show's "wrong answer" buzzer go off in my mouth. As a result, I'm not a fan of the "Fresh Mex" style of cooking. You know, "we lightly grill the chicken breast, and then we smother it in lime juice and cilantro." No thanks, I prefer the old style preparation. "We deep-fry our home-made corn tortillas and pile them high with refried beans, shredded beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and sour cream, and top it off with a single black olive."
2. Some people hate the sound of balloons being rubbed or packing tape being unrolled. Those sounds don't bother me. What sound does? The screech of a kitchen knife against a stainless steel countertop. Ugh!
3. Speaking of sound, I don't visit bars and nightclubs and such because noise plus crowds does not agree with me. Also, I am not much of a dancer.
4. Instead, I'd rather just visit friends and play board games or something. In fact, I've got a closet full of them gathering dust (board games, that is) because most are for three or more players.
5. Before I moved, I played pen-and-paper RPG's about once a week. I haven't played once since. I may or may not decide to sell my RPG book collection.
6. However, I've gone to the Comic-Con every year since the move. But I've definitely decided to sell my comic book collection.
7. I went to school with a guy that had the very same birthday as myself. I don't believe we've ever said more than five words to each other.
8. That could be said for most of the people I went to school with.

So there are eight random facts about myself for you. Now, who to tag, who to tag...? I think I'll tag Cheile just to annoy him, then Sari, for being so foolish kind as to leave comments, and finally... you, you random Googler. You're not getting away from here that easily! Mua ha ha! Mua ha ha! Mua ha ha!

The first of many, I hope, new things to come to this site is a poll widget. It should be found somewhere in the sidebar. The purpose of this poll is to find out what new feature my dear readers might like to see most. And feel free to leave a comment if you think of an option I've overlooked.

Check out this home-brewed pick-and-place machine for assembling circuit boards with surface-mounted components. This is even better than the Lego duck machine. I so want one.

Citybeat has an article on a proposed California bullet train and why it's still only proposed. Basically, "it's not cost-effective in the short term." See, it's this sort of thinking that got us where we are today-- and keeps us there-- the focusing on short-term benefits and discounting the long-term implications. In the short term, building cars and drilling for oil is beneficial. Without them, America dies. And it's precisely because of that fact that we need to consider suffering short-term penalties for long-term benefits. We can't wait for the market to decide, because the market is too short-sighted.

And speaking of short-sighted, I heard on the radio this afternoon of a new bill that would give favorable postal rates to mass-media (such as Time-Warner) at the expense of smaller publishers. It is speculated that this would drive most small publishers toward an online-only format, and many out of business completely.

Until next time.. and hopefully by then I'l have something more robot-y to share with you..

Electroplankton calls our attention to this article. Although it seems the existence of a "gay gene" is still contested, some researchers have found some biometrics that do seem to correspond with an individual being gay. For example, if a male's hair swirls counterclockwise (as mine does) and his index finger is longer than his ring finger (as mine is), if he's left-handed (I'm not), or if he has narrow fingerprint ridges (I don't think so) then there's a possibility that he's gay (true, but you already knew that.)

This is surely good news for the gaydar-impaired (such as myself) but this study also raises the same troubling possibility that the facial pattern matching widget did. Data can be mined for evil as well as good.

Although it would be difficult to get people to enter "hair swirl direction" and "finger length ratio" into their (say) DMV forms, it wouldn't be difficult to take their prints or determine which hand they used to sign the form. And while this data wouldn't be conclusive, it could raise a pink flag. This might not be that useful to an organization that precisely targets individuals. But to an organization that's after a population, especially if it doesn't matter that a few fish escape the net, it might be useful indeed.

The readers have spoken. The Electronic Replicant's newest feature will be a weekly webcomic!

There's also a new poll up for your entertainment.

Behold the underactuated prosthetic fingertip!

Quite possibly the most impressive thing I've seen all day.

The Stochastic Man

Since I read this post without commenting, I now face being tormented not only with improper sentences having excessive exclamation marks, but also with something involving ducks. The former is life on the Internet!!!!! but the latter is completely unacceptable. Therefore, I choose the honorable course of action and present Five Reasons I Blog:

1. I'm not the biggest South Park fan, far from it, but I'm reminded of what the show's creators said about it. "It gives us a bullhorn to yell at America with." Well, the Electronic Replicant is hardly South Park, so I guess what I have is more of a rolled-up piece of paper. But I can still yell at America, even that is just to say, "Yeah! What he said!"
2. To share information that I may have had to discover the hard way, particularly in regards to whatever crazy project I may have been working on at the time. And yes, perhaps I haven't been doing such a good job of that lately.
3. To try and keep in touch with friends. E-mailing is something I have to remind myself to do, and I still have a lingering residual animosity toward telephones.
4. To perhaps make new friends. While this is just maybe not working out quite as well as I'd hoped, at least I don't have to get all dressed up for it.
5. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I can only describe Tesla Down Under as a real Mad Science Fair. No sign of Tongue-Tongue or Dr. Mung-Mung, sadly.

ASCII has a nicely detailed account of how the sysop of the first BBS got the computer to answer the phone. Now that is hacking in the original sense of the term.

Finally, the Lifesuit is a robotic exoskeleton powered by compressed air and the BASIC Stamp. Its creator, Monty Reed, hopes that it will someday allow the disabled to walk again.