Drunken Pumpkin

A doctor says to his patient, ‘I have bad news and worse news’.
‘Oh dear, what’s the bad news?’ asks the patient.
The doctor replies, ‘You only have 24 hours to live’.
‘That’s terrible’, said the patient. ‘How can the news possibly be worse?’
The doctor replies, ‘I’ve been trying to contact you since yesterday’.

It looks to me like Jeff was out looking for some of the silly things that we as a species do. My main evidence of this comes from the fact that he posted the video of a chimp that has been taught Karate.

Science Fiction has told us that we should worry about the machines becoming so smart that they realize they don’t need us and taking over the world. Jeff has thrown that idea to the wind and been building machines capable of independent thought since the late seventies. He worked from the ideas presented by Dr. Hofstadter and built a computer that can think and create cute little nonsense stories in the vein of Lewis Carrol. And I have to say that Alfonse has never once acted like he was going to take over the world. Except after the last election, and he thought that we just didn’t deserve to make our own decisions anymore. But Jeff just gave him a copy of the latest Tiger Direct catalog and Alfonse went off to his room for a little while and calmed right down.

Jeff has speculated that our real worry is not machines, but animals that pose a real threat. And teaching a creature that shows all of our impulses for violence and is a good three times stronger than us how to kick our ass is a profoundly bad idea. That’s really how the Planet of the Apes will start off. We’ll show these monkeys how to stomp us into the ground and then they’ll do it.

A further example of the silly things that we do is the commercial for optics that Jeff posted. I remember when Jeff made the turtle neck and bowl cut thing popular oh so long ago. He laughed for months when that little fad took off. And here it is again in a hip new form. I wonder if Jeff sprayed soda on his monitor when that popped up.

Tune in tomorrow when Jeff brings us examples of something like a simile.