When he found out I was doing her, he took a baseball bat to the windshield of my completely restored candy yellow 1973 Mustang, like the model shown here (courtesy Classic Pony Cars ). I'll always remember her for a man doesn’t get inside a car like that very often in this life. And for trivia, did you know the day the Mustang hit the market was March 19, 1964? Near-riot crowds surrounded the showrooms and on that single day, Ford sold 22,000 of these cars. It has become widely accepted into mainstream American culture that the then company president, Iacocca, has never once shut his mouth since.
I see a few people suggest my surprise on the local crowd at the beach was nothing more than due to hot weather. Listen, I live here and I know that while this is a hot spell, it is nothing unusual for Florida. The numbers of people on the beach is still several times what I’d expect. WalMart is doing a major renovation and the construction crew were impressed by the eBike. For unknown reasons, they were down here from Ohio.
Polyester and nylon. That’s what I’m using for thread these days. Two bucks a spool but it doesn’t fray or break. After some experimenting, I see that what I need is several days practice sewing seam after seam. I’ve been putting it off because it is nowhere near as exciting or cerebral as electronics. When I step on something sharpt these days, I look for a missing transistor. But I could have used some new cutoffs to ride the bike around the last few days.
Success. 3:45 PM I got the home-made H-bridge to work, even if it was a pitifully low current. And I built it without PNP transistors. As a reward, I ate a half pint of chocolate Blue Bell [ice cream]. Yee-haw. This means I can proceed with the Arduino programming, for thanks to matrix LEDs, I know how to code paired transistor switches in my sleep.
Next, I hauled out the new Ibanez semi-acoustic and ran through my song list. I’ve only got 22 songs but that’s enough to start. Plus, my lack of guitar lessons means my arrangements don’t sound anything like the so-called originals found on youTube and net radio. I’ll still need some help and I prefer to chorus through the lead breaks which will sound even better if I can get some help. The sound of the Ibanez, both acoustic and through the PA system is remarkably clear. I’m looking at the Roland PA again.
Cancel my plans to tour the beach on Friday. An evening downpour kept me inside. I read some robot material and isn’t this interesting? A major purpose of the robot was to free mankind from work on an assembly line. Yet, if you look at the robot kits they are teaching high school students to build, well, what exactly is that training them to do?
I also read some advanced robotics tutorials. Asimov’s robot law is often referred to, where rule one is that robots cannot harm humans. Tell that to the Taliban. There is some great material at Society of Robots if you put on your thinking cap. The consensus is that truly autonomous robots do not exist yet. But robots already exist that can easily outperform humans that are lazy, unmotivated, uneducated, and you can throw in who are overweight, overpaid, lying, cheating, cold deadbeatin, two-timin’ double-dealin’ mean mistreatin’ . . .
The critics of robot performance are quick to assume every trait is desirable if it results from human emotion. They claim it is our instincts that defeats Martians. That’s plain dumb. The world has never needed as many bad actors as each generation produces. Without a lesson in psychology, I observe that nothing cures obnoxious human behavior faster than letting them know their replacement is standing by. That is why both preachers and housewives detest mistresses. The unwashed masses require incentives to quit being themselves. Robots do an admirable job of it.
Maybe I’m only out to build your basic back-and-forth robot, but that’s not where my thinking stops. Furthermore, I don’t necessarily buy the popular view that robots will do drudge jobs. There are humans whose intellect is perfectly suited for zero work. It must purely be the bad attitude of such humans that cause us to seek their replacements.
I propose a different definition of a robot. A robot is any machine without an on-board human operator that replaces a job formerly done by a human. Thus, a bulldozer is not a robot because of the human controller. A remote control airplane is not a robot because it is not replacing a human job. But the combat drones at war definitely qualify. My intention is that definition is very flexible, for who knows what we’ll invent. I didn’t say the brains of the proletariat could not be made useful by rewiring. Removal and rewiring.
