Fear not, till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane

Dude. Did everybody see the DROID commercial yesterday? I’m impressed and I haven’t even clapped eyes on the device yet. I’ve been a huge anticipator of the Storm 2, but this bit from Verizonwireless.com is kinda the final nail in the coffin.

DROID is a trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd. and its related companies. Used under license.

Dude. It’s the Star Wars phone. Let me repeat that for the visually impaired. IT’S A F#@*ING STAR WARS PHONE!!! AND IT RUNS ANDROID!!!

It’s 1:20 AM on the nineteenth of October, and Thor knows what he’s saving his allowance for.

And apparently, something will happen at midnight on October 30 (at least, according to the predator-style countdown on Verizon’s DROID page). Does that mean the ad campaign shifts into sixth gear on 10-30? Does it mean I can walk down to my Verizon store and buy the phone on 10-30?

I dunno. But I’m going to look into it. Not now. There are dirty, swaying men at my door. They’re looking for Brian. I need to go deal with that.

2001

I just finished (no joke. Five minutes ago) reading 2001: a Space Odyssey. Wow. You really have to read the book to get anything at all from the movie. All that stuff with the apes makes sense now, and the first third of the movie actually means something.

If you haven’t read this book, do it right now. If I can read it in a week (and I did), you can do it in less. I didn’t realize that while Stanley Kubrick was filming the movie, Clarke was still writing the book, which wasn’t in bookstores until after the film was released.

Okay. I could just type every word of the epilogue, but I won’t. Go to a bookstore, or download the book, or go to the library. If you’re not going to read the book, at least read the epilogue. It doesn’t give anything away. It’s not even part of the story.

So… Last week I read Caves of Steel, and that was good, but different. Asimov is a great storyteller. Clarke is a great writer. Asimov tells an engrossing story of a detective in a future society where robots are third-class citizens. It’s a very complex social environment and it’s very cool.

Clarke rights about people. Humans. Every page is drenched in so much imagery that sometimes you have to read a page twice because you get so wrapped up in it that you forget what he’s actually describing.

Concerning machines: HAL is real. He acts like a computer; he thinks like a computer. Asimov’s robots… Not so much. They’re more romanticized. They’re people who happen to be made of metal. Very far-fetched and hard to relate to. When you read an Asimov book, you put reality on hold and take it on faith that these things are possible.

Reading Odyssey, I had to leave the light on. I measured my blackberry (on whom I read the whole book) to make sure it’s dimensions aren’t exactly 1:4:9 (It’s close enough that I had to measure it twice). I didn’t have to suspend reality because everything in the book is not so much “within the realm of plausibility” as it is “completely believable.” I mean War of the Worlds believable.

While I don’t mean to knock Asimov, I’d forgotten that reading a book could be this much fun. The last book I read that was this good was Dune. I wonder if 2001 is on blu-ray yet…

A question for the ages

Law 1: A robot must never harm a Human Being or, by inaction, allow a Human Being to come to harm.
Law2: A robot must obey any order given by a Human Being, unless following such an order would violate the first law.
Law 3: A robot must act to protect its own well-being, excet where doing so would violate one or both of the first two laws.

So what happens if a robot observes two Humans fighting? If it intercedes, one of the Humans will inevitably be harmed by the robot's action. If the robot does not intercede, one or both of the Humans will inevitably be harmed. What's a robot to do?