Archive for the ‘David Kopaska-Merkel’ Category
A Man Walks Into A Bar
Monday, February 4th, 2008
A hunchback says “it seems a fellow with eight arms walks into a bar and…”
The guy with the slits interrupts him. “You don’t start a story like that. You don’t say ‘it seems,’ you just start right in talking. Like ‘A fellow with eight arms takes a head off the guy next to him at the bar.'”
“Yeah, Kelly said that,” agrees the fellow with the long neck. “He oughta know how to tell a story.”
“But that ain’t what happened,” the hunchback protests, “the other guy didn’t have any heads at all, and…”
“No head?!” A really thin guy glides over from a nearby table. His head is the widest part of him, because of the nose, and his expression says he couldn’t imagine having a smaller head, much less no head. “That meant he didn’t have no nose. How did he smell?”
Slits starts to answer, and the hunchback says “Now look, whose joke is this?” but that is as far as he gets. Just then someone comes in the door. He has a whole bunch of arms and is holding some kind of weapon in each hand. He starts shooting (which is completely illegal) and all the raconteurs dive for the floor. Octopus Boy is tearing the place up. The light fixture suspended from the ceiling partially explodes and the remains start spinning lazily, shedding sparks. Most of the surviving patrons are on the floor, some dripping fluids, and the smell of oxygen acceptors is harsh in the air. Suddenly there’s a shout from the back of the room:
“Finish the joke! The guy with no heads! What does he do?!” This elicits a brief volley from the heavily armed character in the doorway. When it ends, the hunchback quavers from underneath a table.
“He smells as bad as ever.”
Another volley, and the shooter speaks for the first time: “Who am I? Chopped liver?!
A different voice from the back of the room. “And the guy who walks into the bar? What happens to him?”
O. B. pauses to slap himself in the forehead.
The hunchback answers. “You fellows really ain’t heard this one? He rubs his head and says ‘ow!'”
Octopus Boy throws up several of his arms in disgust and just walks back out on the street.
The end
Request for Proposals
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
I have to start with some ancient history.
It began with medicine, of course. Our lives were extended from an average of 25 standard years to 50, 60, then a hundred, and then several hundred. Gradually, we stopped taking chances. Laws were passed to prevent activities society deemed dangerous. Then those too young to reproduce were forbidden all sorts of behaviors once typical of childhood. Remember rollerskates? I loved them once… The laws weren’t the most insidious change. Soon we voluntarily stopped sliding down slopes, swimming in water, and eventually even going outdoors. Nanotechnology accelerated the process. You might think that replacing the human body with self replicating machines would have reversed our growing obsession with safety and preservation of our lives. After all, if you broke your neck skiing and you were a nanoman or nanowoman healing was a cinch. But we had already gone too far. We now had the potential to live for millennia. The old joke
Q: Do nanofolks live thousands of times as long as biological people?
A: Yes, but it doesn’t feel like it.
wasn’t funny anymore. It was true. People began obsessively calculating probabilities and avoiding anything whose probability was greater than this or greater than that. Soon, anything whose probability was measurable at all. Giving up pets was hard. I almost still miss my last cat. He was affectionate in a self-centered way, but when he died I could not risk replacing him. Finally, even sex became too dangerous. Progeny were all engendered in vitro. After a while, no one bothered with that. The drive to propagate had been replaced with the drive to prolong the self.
And that’s why I’m contacting you now. I’m sitting here, inside my personal event horizon, having a radical thought. If I’m NOT the only one left, and I might be, maybe I should go out into the universe and try to find some other people. It’s time for a new research program, one that I’m sure we can all get behind. See, we need to find a way out of this universe fast, before entropy snuffs it out. Because our black holes won’t last forever. When they evaporate we will be gone. And I’m not ready. I’ve hardly had time to live!
The end