Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "If this screen looks blurred, or otherwise out of focus, get a life." - Darryl Dean DePriest

Reading: Mary Morris (editor), Maiden Voyages

Listening to: The Foremen, Folk Heroes

Decluttering accomplishments: threw out some computer printouts from over twenty years ago

2 May 2002 - Ratbots in the Primitive World

Every morning at work, I make a cup of tea and settle down with the news. The news I refer to is really a sort of weblog that comes daily out on the Air Force base. It's a nice compendium of extracts from various newspapers, focused on defense and military matters. It's surprisingly balanced, with editorials on both sides of many issues. I don't read every item but skim for things that have to do with the program I work on or with parts of the world I'm interested in. And, of course, there's the rare and delightful bizarre story.

This morning's edition had the news that our program had survived the reviews back in Washington that have been eating up so much of our time recently. We still have lots of replanning work to do, but this is a big step forward. I had expected to hear the news more formally, but that didn't come until late in the afternoon.

But the better story was right below that one. Scientists in New York have implanted electrodes into rat brains to create "live remote-controlled rats." Apparently you can manipulate rats quite a bit by which parts of their brains you stimulate. The basic concept has to do with making them think their whiskers are touching something. The alleged justification is that you can send these ratbots into small spaces to search for trapped people. They can be trained to smell people. And you'd know when they succeed, because you'd hear the people screaming, "Yuck, a rat!" Another benefit is that rats are too light to set off land mines.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about the ethics of this sort of bioengineering. But I have an easy solution to that. Instead of rats, they should find a way to use a similar technique with lawyers. They're already conditioned to find injured people. You'd just have to stimulate the lawsuit and billable hours parts of their brains. And if they set off land mines, who'd care?

The one thing I realized tonight is that you'd have to make sure the control system can be battery operated. My neighborhood had a forty minute blackout. For a change, I was prepared and didn't have to stumble around too far to find my flashlight. I did have to put new batteries in the radio, but that's not surprising. The odd coincidence is that this is the same day that all of the bathrooms in the building I work in were shut down for repairs. It wasn't a big problem, as we could walk over to the next building, but it was an annoyance. I often take vacations in places without reliable electricity and/or modern plumbing, but I expect the modern conveniences when i'm home.