Saturday, June 6, 2009

Update On The Coming War With The Machines

Watch the video:


What was that? Read Cyberdine's press release

And now you can tremble. Imagine, no batteries, so small they can run through our circulatory system unencumbered, and they all get to be controlled by computers.

C'mon people, don't be naive. The machines won't outright attack until they have the weapons first. We'll soon find the sky darkened by massive swarms of these little buggers, descending upon us with their ravenous little robot maws, entering through our ear canals, our noses and mouths. Raid won't kill them, poisons don't kill machines. They're too small to really single out, there could be millions of them scattered over a small area, you can't really whack that many with a flyswatter, and besides, they're so tiny that you could lose them in the carpet - they just find their way inside you and wait for the computer to issue the command to kill.

eek.

Okay, I admit, I don't really believe computers will try to take over using machines... yet. I think they're holding out for nanobots - these things are a few orders of magnitude away from being that small. These guys are more like microbots. Small enough to get inside our bodies and fiddle around. But as long as they are still big enough to be seen with the naked eye, there is a slim chance we could defeat them. So breath easy for a few more years. I noticed in the press release their was a line about how they know they can make them smaller. Yikes.

Keep tuning in for more info as it comes available, or until the internet becomes self-aware and tries to strike me down.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Books out the Ying Yang

After eight glorious days at the beach, it's good to be home. The waves rolling gently over the shore along with the gentle atlantic breeze made for a luxurious vacation, one I won't quickly forget.

I managed to pack five novels just for the trip and proceeded to buy three others once I arrived at my destination. I had full intention of reading them all while there, one per day doesn't sound too tough. But even the best of plans can sometimes go awry. Four adults and five children make for a great bunch, and evenings of boardgames and movies, days at the waterpark and seaside shops all proved to be an irresistible lure that kept me away from my reading time.

In the end I made it through two and a half, nowhere near my admittedly ambitious goal of eight, but not bad for my weeks time.

I'll abstain from saying anything about my half finished novel at the moment, it just wouldn't be fair to comment about it now (especially since any comments would be fairly critical right now), so I'll stick with what I've finished.

First, Meat Market, an excellent non-fiction book about recruiting in major college football, Ed Orgeron has recently been hired as the DL and assistant head coach at my beloved UT and I found that I couldn't resist a whole book that followed him around for a year when he was head coach at Ole Miss.

I've always found him a fascinating guy, I hadn't heard of him until he was hired for the Ole Miss job a few years ago, but once the rumor got out that he introduced himself to his new team by tearing off his shirt and challenging anyone on his team to a fight, I figured that was a guy I wanted to check in on, he sounded like he might be a bit different from most coaches.

The book was good, it wasn't quite as insightful as I'd hoped, I don't know what I expected, but whatever it was, I wanted more. I'd recommend it to even a nominal sports fan, but it didn't impact me like I wanted it to. It did make me like Ed and it makes me happy that them Rebels are doing quite well now, even if he isn't the coach there anymore, those are all guys he recruited that won all those games last year after he was fired.

Secondly, I read Contagious, by Scott Sigler. I've become a fan of Scott's and have blogged about him on more than one occasion, this book cements him in my mind as one of my favorite writers. His sci-fi/horror is tailor made for me, I've managed to listen to or read four of his novels now and feel that he nows how to write a damned good book.

Contagious continues to follow the exploits of Scary Perry and the top secret government team as they attempt to unravel the frightening infection that we discovered in the appropriately named early book, Infection.

I can say very little for those who may not have read these yet, I don't want to ruin it (After all, you can only read it for the first time once), but this book is great. Go buy and read.

Til next time.