DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

In the, err, vein of RealAge, Harvard University offers Your Disease Risk, an online survey designed to highlight risk factors for any of five diseases: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, and stroke. (Hat tip: Bim)

Also provided are Nine Ways To Stay Healthy and Prevent Disease. Sure, these are common sense, but then again 61% of adult U.S. residents are overweight… so maybe these are really uncommon sense.

Disease is a societal as well as personal challenge. Your government pays an enormous amount of money to treat the sick, even the sick who through dangerous lifestyle choices brought their disease on themselves. Sample statistic, from the American Diabetes Association:

[T]he nation spends $13,243 on each person with diabetes, compared to $2,560 per person for people who don’t have diabetes.

Artificial Intelligence researcher Steve Grand on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

Asimov’s laws are about as relevant to robotics as leeches are to modern medicine.

Speculative fiction has fed science for years, but apparently not in this case! The full article is here: Movie tests Asimov’s moral code for robots

There is a new website dedicated to the exploration of Asimov’s Three Laws: 3 Laws Unsafe.

The first thing that has to be said about Asimov’s I, Robot is that it is not the same story as the new Will Smith movie of the same name. Rather, the movie is “suggested by” the book (quoting IMDB).

I believe I, Robot was the first science fiction book I read, over 20 years ago. I re-read it once in college, and again last week. It hasn’t aged as well as I expected. Or, maybe I haven’t aged as well. In fact that’s certainly the case.

The book isn’t a novel so much as a collection of short stories tied together by a sketchy narrative. The short stories are presented as recollections of famed “robopsychologist” Susan Calvin, in the context of an interview at the end of her career at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. Some of the stories are more successful than others.

Asimov can be credited with one of the great science fiction inventions of all time: the “Three Laws of Robotics.” Three simple sentences outlining a robot’s behaviorial rules gave Asimov a framework for tons of fiction. In this collection, Asimov seems to have sat down with his Three Laws and consciously extrapolated strange situations that would follow from rigidly-logical adherence to them.

In the best of the stories (“Evidence”), a political candidate is accused of being a robot. His opponents’ attempts to prove their case, and the candidate’s responses, provide a master class in political staging and image handling. The story is as relevant today as when it was written in 1946.

All in all, this is an easy and quick read, and serves as a good introduction to the Three Laws of Robotics. Also, it’s a classic. It serves as a good introduction to the genre.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)

Last Fall, the auto club’s VIA Magazine ran an article about Vancouver, British Columbia. The first paragraph grabbed my attention:

For the last five years, Vancouver artist Kent Avery has spent his weekends stacking stones on the English Bay waterfront… Avery hops down off the seawall and begins to tug and lug, setting one rock atop another until he has engineered a Dr. Seuss skyline of improbable teetering obelisks, sometimes more than a hundred of them, precarious sky castles three, five, 12 rocks tall. Eventually, the incoming tide knocks them all down and Avery starts over. He leaves a tip jar on the wall beside a notebook of facts and photos. [The] book boasts, “It’s all about balance!”

Regular readers of this site may recall my penchant for creating stone sculptures. But mine are lame compared to Avery’s. I use flat stones because they’re easier to stack… whereas Avery finds the round and oblong ones and stacks them improbably on end. Check out this photo from Mike Whybark’s gallery.

During our recent visit to Vancouver, I made sure to seek out Kent Avery and his mastery of balance. We parked in the southwest corner of Stanley Park and hiked north, clockwise around the park. I quizzed every pedestrian, flapping the VIA article: “Have you seen this man?!” Everyone I asked had seen the sculptures, but not that day. It seems Avery had vanished like his ephemeral art.

I believe we found the area where he works, though, so we set about creating a few sculptures of our own. For the first time I tried to do this the hard way — I found a round stone and stood it on end on a boulder. Then I surprised myself and stacked another one on top — although not on end, alas!

Townshend on Michael Moore (seen in Pete Townshend’s diary):

[Michael Moore] will have to work very, very hard to convince me that a man with a camera is going to change the world more effectively than a man with a guitar.