One year ago today: May 3, 2013, food!
Five years ago today: May 3, 2009
Ten years ago today: May 3, 2004, mostly work-related.
Here is a blogsite photo from the robot meetup. Their posts center around A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) and coding. Since that (A.I.) is about as exciting as getting a haircut, I’m guessing the actual mechanics of a robot will draw the most interest. Thusforth, I posted a private e-mail address for attendees to contact each other without the formal club site. Some of us may not want the entire world reading our correspondence. Like political surveys, I find public forums discourage relevant question-asking. (The Rommel photo below is what I used on my bio.)
But I will say I never felt more at home in Florida as on campus again. A few of the for-profit local colleges with their modular classrooms can give anyone a poor impression of the south. I’ve driven through Nova before but this was my first real stop and I liked it. It looks and feels like a real university. But before anyone trots over there to rub elbows, be mindful that these places have a highly structured social atmosphere not found anywhere else. It is subtle but there is very little that can disguise the role of universities as permanent playgrounds for the offspring of the idle rich.
And certainly at Nova, there are no starving students. At least nothing on the scale of the stark poverty which I once endured. Thousand dollar laptops, fashionable clothes, the average age in the room was probably thirty (in my day it was maybe twenty). Only three motorcycles in the parking lot including mine, but lots of late model sedans. Now I wish I didn’t live so far from the place.
When I say the meetup, I should be more specific. Meetup is a website that lists clubs within 25 miles of each member’s zip code. I’ve mentioned it here before but two aspects have changed. One is the site architecture. It has been totally cleaned up although it is now “more facebook-like” which isn’t a big plus for me. Overall, Meetup has a more polished presentation. No link for reasons.
The second change is the sheer number of clubs and associations. It is evident that Meetup has quashed the competition. The site lists 149 meetups in my geographic area. For a lark, let’s take a look at the composition of those events. Let’s examine it as a cross-section of the Florida populace. I do notice there are no blatant sales-pitch clubs like years ago so maybe they clamped down on that. Same with religion. I’ll inventory the clubs with the largest claimed memberships. I created ten categories for this list.
Money 14
Women/Support/Healing 6
Dating 12
Political 4
Wild/Conservation 5
Ethnic 12
Cars/Pets/Sports 23
Food 3
Author/Intellect 9
Travel/Photography/Music 9
I didn’t spend much time sorting, so if say an outdoor club said Jewish, it instantly landed in Ethnic. Cars, pets, and sports get lumped together as they are all equally boring. I threw poker into that count. The largest club was real estate investors with 1,114 members. (What else is there for real estate types to do these days but join clubs?) Two that defied categorization are tarot card reading and a society to promote the acceptance of fur garments.
Mind you, real estate is still moving in S. Florida. Banks are slowly easing up on lending and it is clear that most people have not learned a damn thing from having lost their houses. Also, foreign money is snapping up the bargains just fast enough to prevent a meltdown. It only takes a walk through Sunny Isles to see the place is being bought up by international, um, syndicates I guess you could call them. When it comes to greed, the American welcome mat is out.
One barometer of how dismally stupid some people are has got to be the dorks who publish anything on the Internet as “rare”. You know, rare combat footage, rare pictures, rare—my eye. It isn’t rare, Dude. It is on the freaking Internet. And who likes bleeding hearts? The ones all boiled up over that botched execution. The condemned Afro-American tried to fight back, they tasered him, and made the injection through the leg rather than arm. A vein collapsed, happens all the time. Took him 38 minutes to die later from a heart attack. Poor baby.
Listen to me, that ogre deserved it. Don’t hand us that crap about cruel and unusual. He buried his 19-year-old rape victim alive. And no horsh about have we as a society become cruel. Become? Where the hell have you been? Then there are the azzholes who argue that it costs more to execute than imprison. Yes, because protesters tie up the legal system with meritless appeals. If the perp is caught red-handed and confesses, end of argument. End. Of. Argument.
And please, no more donkey that execution is murder. Murder is the illegal taking of life; execution is the legal taking of life. Not knowing the difference tips the world off how uneducated some people can somehow manage to be these days and still become President. (Mind you, via my family, I fully recognize some people are so innately immune to self-stupidity that they had me looking for a loophole in my own birth certificate.)
As for the cost of executing a totally inhuman bastard, I’ll gladly foot my share of the bill and leave a tip.
ADDENDUM
I’ve been in contact with others from the NOVA meet-up. I proposed a contact e-mail for those whose interest in robots may occur more than once a month. So far only one reply. It would be nice to have something in place next time in case, by some miracle, fifteen people show up again. I talked to the Brazil lady who has kidlets in grade school, of which she is an active participant. She reports that there was a robot “class” but it was, like our meeting, somewhat directionless.
Additionally, she said the older students would not let the younger ones even touch the materials, but I take that as more an indication of human nature than any particular class. Still, I know our meet-up will be in need of funding and there are so few real learning kits available at grade-school level. I believe in kits, but not the kind you just snap together. There are actually adults who think such kits teach children anything. Tards. Such adults themselves need a little snapping together.
Can the needs of the meet-up and the grade schools be put together? I know my ideas aren’t brilliant. But they are systematic and written down.
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