Month: May 2001 (Page 7 of 7)

As an ex-journalist and a fan of the First Amendment, most of the time I don’t want the government to limit what people can write or what you can read. But I’ve come to realize that certain books should be prohibited by law:

-Jane Seymour talking about having twins;
-Marie Osmond talking about post-partum depression, especially with a title like “Behind the Smile”;
-teenage opera singer Charlotte Church writing her autobiography.

Sadly, the laws of the land did not move fast enough to prohibit any of the above from reaching bookstores. Sometimes democracy can be just a little to slow on the uptake.

This page reminds me of when the first Macs came out, and someone on campus had one, and we used to amuse ourselves by writing sentences and changing them to wacky giant fonts. Only in reverse. Sort of. (by way of Lines & Splines, a cool weblog about typography)

Tuesday has written a great post about revealing (or not revealing) yourself through your weblog.

In a seemingly related but actually unrelated bit of business, I’ve added some new details to my exhaustive (exhausting?) about page.

Joke for you:
Two elephants are standing in a jungle clearing, both wearing party hats. Around them is strewn the remnants of birthday party decorations – horns, banners, confetti, etc.

ELEPHANT #1: “Wow, that was great. I can’t remember when I had a better time. Of course, that’s just a figure of speech.”

In surfing around among the sites in the “A.I.” online game (see yesterday’s entry), I’ve become fascinated with the idea of androids. There have been a lot of predictions of future societies and what they would look like, and most of the time we laugh at the “Logan’s Run” vision of the future. But just imagine if you could buy an android, outwardly indistinguishable from a human being, for, say, the price of a Lexus? It could be any race, sex, size, etc. that you wanted, and it would behave in exactly the way you specified to the manufacturer. The societal, ethical, legal and economic implications would be truly mindboggling. You would own a thing, an object, a possession that could look, act and feel just like a human being. Since it’s technically an object, you could use it for any purpose you wanted. No one would have to know that this was an android – even maybe the android itself. This stuff makes cloning seem easy and clearcut.

I can only hope that the movie deals with at least a few of these concepts. We’ll see.