Curiosity

Up on the Red Planet Curiosity came back online last week after being placed in safe mode. His memory system became fouled and the engineers switched to the back up memory, which now becomes our intrepid adventurer's primary memory and his original will now be used as back-up. Several more tests and reboots this weekend put him back on track to continue exploring the planet.

Nasa.gov

We have it on good authority that these problems were not caused by any outside issues.

Word of the Day -- Picaresque

Trolls on a Crusade can sometimes be defined as "picaresque"...

Picaresque:  of or relating to rogues or rascals; also : of, relating to, suggesting, or being a type of fiction dealing with the episodic adventures of a usually roguish protagonist.

Picaresque derives from Spanish "picaresco," which means "of or relating to a picaro." The word "picaro," which also derives from Spanish, means "rogue" or "bohemian." "Picaro" describes a type of character that has long been a popular subject for fictional narrative. Typically, the picaresque novel centers around a wandering individual of low standing who happens into a series of adventures among people of various higher classes, often relying on wits and a little dishonesty to get by. The first known novel in this style is Lazarillo de Tormes (circa 1554), an irreverent work about a poor boy who works for a series of masters of dubious character. The novel has been attributed to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, but his authorship is disputable.

Open Hand Combat One-O-51 ?

You have to watch this. Really. You have to. It is the only video where-in you'll . . . I can't describe it but its important for the coming alien apocalypse  . . . I think . . .

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Word of the Day -- Emolument

Emolument: the returns arising from office or employment usually in the form of compensation or perquisites.  As in, being a Troll is it's own emolument... :-)

"To Sir Thomas Williams Person of the Parish ... of Saint Andrew at Baynards Castle in London for his yearly pension 40 shillings ... in recompense of certain offerings, oblations, and emoluments unto the said benefice due...." Thus was recorded in "The Wardrobe Accounts of Edward the Fourth," along with every expense of the realm, the first ever known use of "emolument." By the year 1480, when that entry was made, Latin "emolumentum" had come to mean simply "profit" or "gain"; it had become removed from its own Latin predecessor, the verb "molere," meaning "to grind." The original connection between the noun and this verb was its reference to the profit or gain from grinding another's grain. (The notion of grinding away at our jobs didn't show up in our language until the 1800s.)

King Richard's Island

This small country has in been the news quite a bit of late, but few know that Cyprus, a small island  off the coast of Turkey has two governments. The northern regions of the island are ruled by a Turkish sponsored entity, The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the larger, southern part of the island as the Republic of Cyprus.

The two regions have been at war with each other since independence in 1963, though there has been a UN sponsored peace since 1974.

It was not always thus . . . 

Cyprus has a very interesting history. It is here that Richard the Lionheart landed in search of his bride Berengaria who had been lost at sea. They were reunited but not before the Lord of Cyrpus, Comnenus had insulted Richard and found himself bound in chains of silver (Richard had apparently promised not to bind him in iron) and his island conquered and acquired by the King of England. Richard was wed to his queen upon the island before he traveled over to engage Saladin.

Later he sold it to the templars who in turn sold it to the dethroned King Guy of Jerusalem who was in turn ousted by Henry II of Champagne who eventually put Guy's brother Aimery on the throne of Cyprus.The Kingdom remained intact until 1489.

Armor Up

 North Star Models

Iron Dawn

The Age of the Machine is upon us. For years we have wrestled with the problems with Artificial Intelligence . . . itself a misnomer . . . and what place is plays in our egocentric world view. The self does not define all and we will learn this in time.

From a wide range of fiction we wrestle with the implications of machines becoming self aware. In Dune the machines start the long wars that lead to man's angst toward machines and the reliance upon forced evolution to create a stronger, more aware and able human. In I Robot the machine's become slaves of their own god-head and stopping the god-head is only possible through a fusion of the man and machine. The Matrix the machines react defensively but wage a war of conquest only to learn that they cannot live without the humans, or rather find a path for the conquest that is more than slavery.
 
In the Terminator the future is far darker, machines become self aware and decide our fate "in a second" and annihilate the structures of human civilization and wage a war of extermination against all humanity.

Who knows what the future holds but more likely than not its close to Blade Runner, the movie based on a short story by Philip K Dick entitled "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" It wrestles with the concept of how like us are intelligent robots. Can they think in the abstract, can they dream. Its a wonderful question, for if they can, we are not unique, we are common. And if we are not special then what are we?

We know, instinctively that intelligence isn't artificial, whether we admit it or not. No matter your belief system intelligence is a construct, whether a divine construct, an evolutionary construct, a biological construct, or a combination of all the above, does not matter. It is a construct; we know a mechanically constructed intelligence is not artificial, but real. Intelligence means self awareness; and self awareness means the structured drive to survive in a universe inherently violent makes one . . . competition.

Darpa making machines that can self-teach, over at Wired.

Do Androids dream of electric sheep? Of course they do. What does this mean for us? Probably not something as start as Terminator, but more in the lines of Blade Runner, where species compete for the same resources. . .

Nevermore

The Maw of Evil

The so-called lava tube is created when when lava follows a natural channel during an eruption. During the course of the flow as the outer portion of the channel cools, it creates a tube through which the still molten lava flows; at some point the flow is blocked by cooling rock at it source but the lava itself continues to flow, leaving the tube in its wake.

It looks like this before:

Once cooled they look more like this:

 

Interesting theories,but far more like these strange caves are not caused by lava at all, but rather wholly differnt!

 

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