How Fast Are You?

From the darkly awesome Small Victories, for those who like their humor like they like their wo/men: dark and bitter.

Today’s poetry moment is brought to you by Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

- e.e. cummings

Quoth Mr. Ellis:

If love was all you need, then hugging people would have nutritional value. It doesn’t. However, killing and eating them does. QED.

Words to live by, my friends.

Researchers at Toshiba’s Akimu Robotic Research Institute created a humanoid robot called Kenji, designed to emulate human emotions. At one point, Kenji’s creators claimed it he could feel love. Things quickly took a turn for the worse, as you might imagine.

Quoth MuckFlash:

After some limited environmental conditioning, Kenji first demonstrated love by bonding with a a stuffed doll in his enclosure, which he would embrace for hours at a time. He would then make simple, but insistent, inquiries about the doll if it were out of sight… As of last week, Kenji’s love for the doll, and indeed anybody he sets his ‘eyes’ on, is so intense that Dr. Takahashi and his team now fear to show him to outsiders.

The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly. The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji.

Ever since that incident, each time Kenji is re-activated, he instantaneously bonds with the first technician to meet his gaze and rushes to embrace them with his two 100kg hydraulic arms. It doesn’t help that Kenji uses only pre-recorded dog and cat noises to communicate and is able to vocalize his love through a 20 watt speaker in his chest.

Japan is indeed a strange land, and Japanese robotics labs are clearly not for the faint of heart.

Via JR > CrunchGear.

No wonder I never understood what the cool kids were talking about.

Via xkcd – A Webcomic.

Via xkcd – A Webcomic.