Pop
One of single greatest pop-culture events of our generation. You need to watch it again. Now.
Isaac

Terminator 2: Judgment Day
A future filled with fully automated autonomous robots may not be just the stuff of entertainment. Read this, from the Times Online:
Military’s Killer Robots Must Learn Warrior Code
by Leo Lewis
Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.
The stark warning – which includes discussion of a Terminator-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters – is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research.
The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans. Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.
“There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do,” Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. “Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when . . . programs could be written and understood by a single person.” The reality, Dr Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program: accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field – an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.
The solution, he suggests, is to mix rules-based programming with a period of “learning” the rights and wrongs of warfare.
A rich variety of scenarios outlining the ethical, legal, social and political issues posed as robot technology improves are covered in the report. How do we protect our robot armies against terrorist hackers or software malfunction? Who is to blame if a robot goes berserk in a crowd of civilians – the robot, its programmer or the US president? Should the robots have a “suicide switch” and should they be programmed to preserve their lives?
The report, compiled by the Ethics and Emerging Technology department of California State Polytechnic University and obtained by The Times, strongly warns the US military against complacency or shortcuts as military robot designers engage in the “rush to market” and the pace of advances in artificial intelligence is increased.
Any sense of haste among designers may have been heightened by a US congressional mandate that by 2010 a third of all operational “deep-strike” aircraft must be unmanned, and that by 2015 one third of all ground combat vehicles must be unmanned.
“A rush to market increases the risk for inadequate design or programming. Worse, without a sustained and significant effort to build in ethical controls in autonomous systems . . . there is little hope that the early generations of such systems and robots will be adequate, making mistakes that may cost human lives,” the report noted.
A simple ethical code along the lines of the “Three Laws of Robotics” postulated in 1950 by Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, will not be sufficient to ensure the ethical behaviour of autonomous military machines.
“We are going to need a code,” Dr Lin said. “These things are military, and they can’t be pacifists, so we have to think in terms of battlefield ethics. We are going to need a warrior code.”
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Robots in rebellion? Unmanned warcraft?
What sort of a future are we in for?
Stop
As we experience a cold, cold winter, many of us are enduring the hardships of ice, while others are enjoying a day of rest a good day of snow can only provide. Through these winter months, and especially on snowy days, I am reminded of the following verse from Job 37:
God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways; he does great things beyond our understanding. He says to the snow, ‘Fall on the earth,’ and to the rain shower, ‘Be a mighty downpour.’ So that all men he has made may know his work, he stops every man from his labor.
God sends us snow so we may rest from our labor, from our work, from our week of filled schedules, so we can, if for a moment, behold God’s power. We marvel at the inspiring beauty of snow and ice, even while we endure its inconveniences.
Just remember, though, that it was always God’s intention to provide the snow of winter, and the storms of spring, so that even the visible weather would testify to the invisible God.
May you enjoy your rest today.
Kiss

The Sleeping Beauty, by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, ca. 1870.
Emma Ray, and her husband Andrew, were shopping just a few days after the birth of their child, when Emma c0llapsed. Andrew, in desperate attempts, tried to revive her, and her heart was eventually restarted while in the care of a local hospital.
The diagnosis was grim, when Andrew was told that his young wife, Emma, was in a coma, and may never wake up. In the doctor’s own words, Andrew heart that his wife could remain a “sleeping beauty.”
Desperate, he stayed by her side, caressed her hand, spoke to her, and played recordings of their newest baby, crying, hoping that somewhere, somehow, Emma would hear those cries and respond. But all of that was to no avail. Emma showed now signs of response.
And then, in a moment of desperation, almost two weeks after Emma collapsed, Andrew leaned over his wife and asked her for a kiss.
Emma then turned her head, opened her eyes, and readied her lips, and gave her husband a kiss. Of all the things that Andrew tried, it was the kiss which woke his wife.
And though her recovery has lasted for almost two years, she is alive, and well, because of true love, and a hope that never died.
You can read more about them here.
Beam
Over the town of Sigulda, Latvia, designer Aigar Truhins took the following images with a “standard digital camera.” Upon seeing the phenomenon, it was reported that his son thought we were being visited by extra-terrestrial beings.
See for yourself.

Sigulda, Latvia

Sigulda, Latvia

Sigulda, Latvia

Sigulda, Latvia
Scientists have determind that the beams are actually reflections of light from the lamp posts, as that light reflects from ice crystals in the air.
It is simply the stuff of wonder and amazement that beauty is created in ways which we seldom understand.
Fine
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane -
Lenny Bruce is not afraid. And if it’s the end of the world, we would know it. Here are five ways that may happen:
Five Ways the World Can End
by Paul Wagenseil
Massive asteroid impact: Asteroids and comets crash into our planet all the time, with varying degrees of damage. The last big one was 100 years ago in Siberia, but in such a remote area that no one died.
Yet scientists keep finding new evidence of medium-sized impacts that caused at least regional devastation — near New York harbor around 300 B.C., in eastern Canada about 11,000 B.C., the famous Meteor Crater in Arizona 50,000 years ago.
Much larger asteroids have been tied to mass die-offs in biological history — the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and the even more devastating Permian-Triassic extinction event 251 million years ago in which some 80 percent of animal species vanished.
It would take an asteroid the size of a small planet to really snuff out life on Earth.
Something very much like that seems to have happened when an object the size of Mars hit the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, and the resulting debris formed the moon. Fortunately, there was no life on Earth yet.
Life on Mars, if it ever existed, might not have been so lucky. Most evidence indicates that the Red Planet was warm and wet in the distant past, and there are signs it had a strong magnetic field to shield the surface from solar radiation.
But recent studies indicate that Mars’ entire northern hemisphere may be a gigantic impact crater, the result of a collision 3.9 billion years ago so huge it may have destroyed the planet’s magnetic field.
Were that to happen on Earth, the few surface organisms that survived the impact and resulting earthquakes and fires would be fried by solar rays.
Massive volcanic eruptions: An alternate theory for the low, flat, featureless Martian northern hemisphere is that huge lava flows simply erased any previous features.
Similarly, there’s good evidence that the dinosaurs back on Earth were killed not by an asteroid, but instead, or additionally, by enormous eruptions in what now is India.
Even moderate eruptions, which kick up huge amounts of soot and dust, blocking sunlight, can have climatic effects. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines significantly cooled the planet in 1991-92, as did Indonesia’s Krakatoa in 1883.
More effective was Mount Tambora on the other end of Java in 1815, which cooled things so much that Europeans called 1816 “the year without a summer” — it snowed in June, and summer frosts killed crops across the Northern Hemisphere.
Moving up the scale, the Mount Toba supervolcanic eruption in Sumatra 75,000 years ago may have cooled the planet enough to force the early human population through a genetic “bottleneck” as most people died, leaving the few survivors to repopulate the world.
And the Yellowstone supervolcano — that’s right, Yellowstone National Park sits atop a massive magma chamber — will probably take out most of the people living between the Rockies and the Appalachians next time it erupts, which could literally be tomorrow.
But neither of those would end life on Earth. For that, it would take something along the lines of the long-ago prolonged eruptions that created India’s Deccan Traps and the Siberian Traps in Russia.
In both instances, giant fissures in the ground simply opened up, oozing lava that spread in every direction for hundreds of miles, releasing huge amounts of deadly gas, smoke and soot into the atmosphere. These events went on for tens of thousands of years.
The Deccan Traps eruptions took place just before the dinosaurs disappeared and formed much of the landmass of the Indian subcontinent. The Siberian lava flows happened 251 million years ago and are the likely cause of the aforementioned Permian-Triassic mass extinction.
In the latter case, 3 million square miles were covered by layer upon layer of lava. It doesn’t take much extrapolation to conclude that an eruption event two or three times the magnitude of the Siberian one could end life on Earth.
Nuclear war: Few people have uttered the phrase “nuclear winter” since the end of the Cold War, but it was a very real fear during the 1980s.
The notion was that a full-scale nuclear war between the Soviet Union and United States would kick huge amounts of dust, smoke and soot up into the atmosphere and blot out sunlight for months or even years, causing mass extinctions as most plants died and most animals starved.
Life has squeaked by in such instances in the past, but the deadly post-nuclear radioactive particles carried around the world could land a deadly second blow on the surviving organisms.
Since the ’80s, further research has indicated that the atmospheric soot would also destroy the ozone layer, letting in more extraterrestrial radiation and further cooling the planet.
The odds of total nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia seem remote now, and no other nations currently have the thousands of warheads it would take for such a doomsday scenario to occur. But there’s always a chance of a full-scale nuclear exchange between future superpowers.
Black hole: Bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape were first theorized in the 1960s, but since then they’ve been “spotted” throughout the universe.
It’s now thought that every spiral galaxy, including our own, has a supermassive black hole at its center.
Smaller black holes are formed by the collapses of large stars, and can be expected to keep moving in the same orbits around galactic centers as they did before the collapse.
The problem is that we’d no longer be able to see them, and would have to watch the behavior of other astronomical bodies to figure out where they might be lurking.
Were a black hole to approach our solar system, we’d begin to notice changes in the light of other stars as it was bent by the black hole’s massive gravity.
Then the orbits of the larger planets would begin to change as they were pulled toward it. The sun would become elongated, and the Earth’s own orbit would shift.
Finally the sun, planets and asteroids would go into spiral orbits around the hole and gradually be sucked into it, one by one, like water going down a drain.
Thanks to the massive tidal disruptions on Earth, not to mention the lack of reliable sunlight, we’d already be dead.
Some think it’s also possible that we could create our own black hole right here on Earth.
Last year, a flurry of lawsuits accompanied the firing up of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland, from people worried it could create a mini-singularity that would gobble up the planet.
Fortunately, the machine broke down after a few days. The end of the world will have to be pushed back to next summer at the earliest.
The expanding sun: If all else fails, the Earth will almost certainly come to an end in about 5 billion years when it falls into the expanding sun.
It’s perfectly natural — stars like ours simply turn into red giants near the end of their lifespans, and their inner planets become toast.
Terrestrial inhabitants need not worry, since they’ll be boiled off much earlier by the sheer heat of the growing star.
Some scenarios say we’ve got only a billion good years left on this planet — rather gloomy, since life in some form has been around for about 3.7 billion years and this means we’re already close to the end.
Then again, it’s also possible that scientists of an advanced future civilization could simply tow out Earth to a safer orbit, after having presumably rendered Mars and Venus inhabitable as well.
That’s if they don’t manage to accidentally destroy the planet first.
And I feel fine.
Confused
A neighboring church hosted a group of bell ringers from a local university to perform a concert in their full and beautiful auditorium. Exquisite woodwork adorned the foyer, and once inside, my eyes were treated with a Christmas tree, tall and adorned in white angels. Candles burned before every stained glass window. As the concert began, the minister stood before us to pray that we would receive the gospel in the bells. Soon after, a group of people walked into the nave of the auditorium, singing a carol and playing their brass bells in perfect timing, soon arranging themselves at the altar of the church, and playing Christmas carols in beautiful music.
But the prayer of the minister, a simple prayer with eloquent language, broke my heart. I received the gospel that night, and was again, reminded, that Christmas is a celebration much larger than ribbons and bows.
And yet we continue to celebrate a practice of excess during this most wonderful time of the year, for Americans will spend close to $450 billion this year for gifts to be unwrapped on just one day — gifts which will lose their meaning quickly in the mix of other gifts you and I will open.
Just a tenth of that amount could provide clean water and food for the starving of the world for an entire year. Some estimates say that one could stretch $40 billion over two years, and still provide enough sustenance for the starving.
The recipients of our gifts are people with means. They have an abundance of gifts under a tree in their home, and have spent much money to give, so much so that the practice of giving is really nothing more than the practice of trading. We exchange gifts with similar costs, and feign surprise when we unwrap a package and discover an item disliked. We have displaced the specialness and warmth of giving a gift with the thought and guilt of doing the same. Long gone are the days when one person holds some special place in our heart, and we treasure the time and the day when they can open a gift given with such thought.
We give our children the idea of gift-giving because of obligation, while on Christmas morn, there are some in our world without food and water, and we forget those people, once we are taken and consumed with an excess of things beneath a tree and the food on long tables. We participate in conversations when families are long gone, when we silently complain about the gathering of our family, or the time we wasted when giving a better gift.
We have sorely, and to our demise, confused the meaning and thrust of Christmas with packaging and tape and plastic cards.
__________
I want to encourage you, today, to visit a website. Called the Advent Conspiracy, it is a movement designed to spur our thinking about Christmas, about our worship, about our expenses, and about true giving. I’ll say no more here, in hopes you visit, and spend a moment of your time there, today.
You may just change the way you see Christmas. I hope you do.

