The Millennium Shrimp

Evidently human soldiers aren’t ethical enough.

In a report to the Army last year, Dr. Arkin described some of the potential benefits of autonomous fighting robots. For one thing, they can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness, Dr. Arkin wrote, and they can be made invulnerable to what he called “the psychological problem of ‘scenario fulfillment,’ ” which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.

His report drew on a 2006 survey by the surgeon general of the Army, which found that fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents. More than one-third said torture was acceptable under some conditions, and fewer than half said they would report a colleague for unethical battlefield behavior.

From the New York Times

What I think we really need are sharks with fricken laser beams on their heads. Or at least some ill tempered mutated seabass.

In 1564 French Huguenots set up Fort Caroline in Spanish-claimed lands near the St. John’s River in Florida. In 1565, these religious dissenters were massacred by a Spanish expedition:

Leading this holy war with a crusader’s fervor, Menéndez established St. Augustine and ordered what local boosters claim is the first parish Mass celebrated in the future United States. Then he engineered a murderous assault on Fort Caroline, in which most of the French settlers were massacred. Menéndez had many of the survivors strung up under a sign that read, “I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to heretics.” A few weeks later, he ordered the execution of more than 300 French shipwreck survivors at a site just south of St. Augustine, now marked by an inconspicuous national monument called Fort Matanzas, from the Spanish word for “slaughters.”

The French were there 50 years before the English colonists at Jamestown or Plymouth.

Interesting news release about a study of contemporary homelessness that will be published early next year in Historical Archaeology.

In the study Larry Zimmerman and Jessica Welch of IUPUI studied the material culture of homeless populations. Material culture - the clothing, utensils and other “stuff” that helps people live.

Some of their findings and even what they did not find surprised them. “We found a large number of food cans. Most had been opened, often not very successfully, with knives or by banging them against rocks or even by heating them until the contents exploded. We rarely found cans that had been opened by a can opener. That made us realize that they didn’t have can openers, which must have been very frustrating to them,” said Zimmerman.

“We also found a lot of hotel-size bottles of shampoo and conditioner, deodorant and toothpaste. Only the toothpaste was used. This tells us that giving things like shampoo and conditioner to individuals without access to water doesn’t make sense. It would be better to send these kinds of things to shelters and not distribute then to people living on the streets. When we try to deliver aid to the homeless we tend to give them what we think they need. A much better way to deliver aid is to target what they actually need, and our work on the material culture of the homeless may help us find out what that really is,” said Zimmerman.

Got this email from mom this morning:

If you receive a mail called’ POSTCARD,’ even though sent to you by a friend, do not open it! Shut down your computer immediately. It has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever. This virus was discovered by McAfee yesterday, and there is no repair yet for this kind of virus. This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information is kept.

Actually, this virus is very serious, and you may already be infected with it. To see if you are, right click on my computer and go to properties. If it says something along the lines of “windows 98, Windows XP, Windows 2000″ you’ll need to do a fresh install of your operating system. Download the Ubuntu Live CD, burn the disc and then do a re-install of your computer. Be sure to reformat your hard drive, too. And you’ll never have to worry about viruses again.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

image001, originally uploaded by millermichael76.

Mike Sine was walking through the office area when he looked out the window and shouted, “oh my god!” A truck at the International Dealer behind our office rolled down the hill and into the creek that separates our office from their lot. That’s probably the most excitment we’ve had at the office in years.

Heh, I’ve always wondered that, too…

My Dad works for Scantron’s Service Group. Or what used to be Scantron’s service group. It’s hard to keep track of who’s what these days. But he does work on the scantron machines. I’ll have to ask what _does_ happen if you don’t use a #2 pencil?