Jonathan's blog

Elliot needs to recruit a new partner in crime. Sunday evening the boys and I were at home while Lisa was out. I was riding the stationary bike in the basement, and the boys went upstairs for a while. Later on in the evening, as they were getting ready for bed, Finn said to me out of the blue: "We didn't eat any chocolate." Of course, it didn't take us long to interrogate Elliot and find out that he and Elliot had managed to get into candy they received at a birthday party Saturday night. Then, when I came home for lunch on Monday, Finn met me at the door. He said, "Smell my breath." I did, but I didn't smell anything. "It smells like sugar," he said. At first I assumed he had eaten some candy. Instead it turns out that, while Lisa was showering, the boys got into the sugar bowl and enjoyed a pack of artificial sweetener.

In a blog post of the same title on Monday, Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) speculated about the inevitable development of humanoid robotics:

Today I will ask you the most frightening question you will ever see on the Internet. It's a hypothetical, just for the guys. QUESTION: Hypothetically, in the future, if a sex doll robot was indistinguishable from a human woman, and you weren't in a relationship with a human, would you tap the robot?

Last month, I was asking myself (and you) a similar question:

So, when the day comes that a robot is indistinguishable from a human...will a distinction be made between human/human adultery/fornication and human/robot adultery/fornication?

One of these days these will be relevant questions. Today, Adams reports the results of his poll:

In yesterday's post, I asked how many of you guys would have sex with a robot if it was indistinguishable from a hot human woman. About 95% of the hetero guys said they would. The other 5% expressed a strong preference for lying.

Since I know you're all dying to follow in great detail my reading habits, I've added a couple things:

• On the right-hand side of the blog is a list of links to the online stories that I've been reading lately.
• A sort of meta-RSS feed of those same stories is here.

Here's how I did it: In Google Reader I started clicking the "share" link at the end of each item that I wanted to share. Under Settings->Tags I clicked the "add a clip to your site" to get the javascript that produces the list of what I'm reading on the right hand side of this blog. That same Settings->Tags page has the link to a web page that lists the shared items. To create an RSS feed, is used the feed43.com service to scrape that web page and create a feed. If anyone else wants to do this, let me know and I'll help (configuring feed43.com isn't at all trivial, but I've figured it out now). Update: it occurred to me that Google probably provides an RSS feed for your shared stories. I checked, and they do...so scraping it with feed43.com isn't necessary. It doesn't seem to be easy to find out the address of that feed, though. Go to the shared items page and view the source. Search in the source for "atom" and that will take you to the url of the feed. Update # 2: The easiest way to find the address of your Google Reader "shared items" feed is to click on the "Shared items" link in the upper left corner, and at the top of the resulting list of shared items there will be a link to the web page and to the feed.

Tonight I finished watching Fantastic Four (2005,PG-13) (ScreenIt! review). I didn't think it was anything special and give it 3 out of 5.

In an editorial with almost the same title, Kathleen Parker discussed the implication of recent study findings:

A new study reports that 42 percent of Internet users between the ages of 10 and 17 have viewed online porn.

This is major unresolved dilemma for parents. Porn is easily and freely available online for anyone. You can filter out the bad stuff coming into your home, but ultimately I can't see how you can really prevent your kids from accessing it at a friends house, a wi-fi hotspot, or somewhere else...if they really want to find it. What's a parent to do? I guess you have to just be really frank with your kids and explain why a lot of stuff that's out there isn't fit to be seen. Any other ideas?