Language and Probability.

I can't help but think of the Wheel when I'm reading about Shannon's experiment with probability, letters, and the Printed English language.

Giving Artificial Intelligence the (Freudian) Slip

Sifting through mountains of material yielded by a Google Scholar search of Freud and robot yielded this bit about one of the founders of AI and a former colleague of Marvin Minsky (who was mentioned by Liu in The Freudian Robot):

From: John McCarthy's Home Page

(Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University)

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/index.html

Making Robots Conscious of their Mental States was given at Machine Intelligence 15, 1995 August in Oxford. It's in the Proceedings of that workshop. The idea is that many tasks will require the computer programs examine their own computational structures in ways like those involved in human consciousness and indeed self-consciousness.

Robots Should Not be Equipped with Human-like Emotions

Human emotional and motivational structure is likely to be much farther from what we want to design than is human consciousness from robot consciousness.

Some authors, [Sloman and Croucher, 1981], have argued that sufficiently intelligent robots would automatically have emotions somewhat like those of humans. However, I think that it would be possible to make robots with human-like emotions, but it would require a special effort distinct from that required to make intelligent robots. In order to make this argument, it is necessary to assume something, as little as possible, about human emotions. Here are some points.

1. Human reasoning operates primarily on the collection of ideas of which the person is immediately conscious.
2. Other ideas are in the background and come into consciousness by various processes.
3. Because reasoning is so often nonmonotonic, conclusions can be reached on the basis of the ideas in consciousness that would not be reached if certain additional ideas were also in consciousness.
4. Human emotions influence human thought by influencing what ideas come into consciousness. For example, anger brings into consciousness ideas about the target of anger and also about ways of attacking this target.
5. According to these notions, paranoia, schizophrenia, depression and other mental illnesses would involve malfunctions of the chemical mechanisms that gate ideas into consciousness. A paranoid who believes the CIA is following him and influencing him with radio waves can lose these ideas when he takes his medicine and regain them when he stops. Certainly his blood chemistry cannot encode complicated paranoid theories, but they can bring ideas about threats from wherever or however they are stored.
6. Hormones analogous to neurostransmitters open synaptic gates to admit whole classes of beliefs into consciousness. They are analogs of similar substances and gates in animals.
7. A design that uses environmental or internal stimuli to bring whole classes of ideas into consciousness is entirely appropriate for a lower animals. We inherit this mechanism from our animal ancestors.
8. Building the analog of a chemically influenced gating mechanism would require a special effort.

These facts suggest the following design considerations.

1. We don't want robots to bring ideas into consciousness in an uncontrolled way. Robots that are to react against people (say) considered harmful, should include such reactions in their goal structures and prioritize them together with other goals. Indeed we humans advise ourselves to react rationally to danger, insult and injury. ``Panic'' is our name for reacting directly to perceptions of danger rather than rationally.
2. Putting such a mechanism, e.g. panic, in a robot is certainly feasible. It could be done by maintaining some numerical variables, e.g. level of fear, in the system and making the mechanism that brings sentences into consciousness (short term memory) depend on these variables. However, such human-like emotional structures are not an automatic byproduct of human-level intelligence.
3. Another aspect of the human mind that we shouldn't build into robots is that subgoals, e.g. ideas of good and bad learned to please parents, can become independent of the larger goal that motivated them. Robots should not let subgoals come to dominate the larger goals that gave rise to them.
4. It is also practically important to avoid making robots that are reasonable targets for either human sympathy or dislike. If robots are visibly sad, bored or angry, humans, starting with children, will react to them as persons. Then they would very likely come to occupy some status in human society. Human society is complicated enough already.

Sadly, I also discovered the following:

John McCarthy, pioneer in artificial intelligence, dies at 84

The Washington Post

John McCarthy, a computer scientist often credited with creating the very name of the futuristic field in which he was an honored pioneer -- artificial intelligence -- died Oct. 24 at his home in Stanford, Calif. He was 84.

The death was announced by Stanford University, where he was a professor in mathematics and later computer science from 1962 until his retirement in 2001.

In the late 1950s, he and Marvin Minsky, a friend and fellow AI specialist, helped start the AI lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their views of the discipline began to diverge and, in 1962, McCarthy returned to Stanford, where he had briefly taught. He soon founded Stanford's artificial intelligence laboratory.

In a 2007 article, McCarthy described artificial intelligence as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines" and said intelligence was "the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world."

Hans Bellmer and Liu...

anonymous posting...

Chapter 5 of Liu’s book The Freudian Robot, talks mostly about “the uncanny.” I was surprised that Hans Bellmer wasn’t mentioned, because his life/ambition is just a surreal as his art. And as I was reading more and more about the “unheimlich” he was the only one that crossed my mind:

>>>Fascinated with the story of the doll Olympia, frustrated in his desires for Ursula, and unable to have any children by his frail wife, Bellmer decided to make himself a doll to act out his fantasies. Funded secretly by his mother, and with the help of Lotte Prinzel and his brother Fritz (who quit his job as an engineer to work on the project), Bellmer constructed his First Doll in 1933. It was made of wooden broom handles, metal rods, nuts and bolts, with one hand and two feet carved out of wood. The head and torso were of flax over a wooden frame, covered in plaster, shaped and painted. This "anagram of the sexual elements of a girl's body" had in place of a womb a panorama of six images "of bad taste representing the thoughts and dreams of a young girl", viewable through the navel and activated by pressing the left nipple. Bellmer documented the Doll's construction with photographs, ten of which and a short text were published at Bellmer's own expense as 'Die Puppe' in 1934. Bellmer saw the doll as a final triumph over the adolescents with "wide eyes" who had shunned his attentions: "Certain objects from their domain had always aroused my lust . . . I was no longer able to find the mysterious ways of these little darlings insignificant . . . all that could be easily taken for seduction, even stimulate desire." The latter photographs in 'Die Puppe' showed the Doll, in whole or in parts, arranged so as to embody some of Bellmer's fantasies. Photo number nine "with its carefully positioned jumble of torso, head and limb plus wig . . . a hint of underclothing set against the background of a striped mattress creates the most astonishingly powerful and disturbing image of the series...<<<

Check out this website about him and to see the photos of his “dolls” (DISCLAMER: The following pages can be offensive because of the explicit sexual content.) 

Time Magazine on Robots

Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2011 16:35:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: "ASHLEY L." Reply-To: "ASHLEY L." Subject: blog
To: William Nericcio
Hi Prof,
I tried to post the attached article on our blog site; It shows the evolution of robots.
I was reading Newsweek and thought it was a cool addition to the blog, so I scanned it. The newest robot is in the popular new iphone, Siri, who is quite the phone robot! You can talk to her, ask her questions, and she even reads your messages and gives you reminders....Thanks, Ashley

"Come on, sucker! Lick my battery!"

Just for funsies.

The Humans are Dead- Flight of the Conchords.


"Finally, robotic beings rule the world!" :)

Ray Kurzweil's "The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine"

After I completed our assigned reading for the "The Freudian Robot", I decided to relax and find a good documentary to watch on netflix. I came across Transcendent Man which is a title I had noticed before, but never bothered to look into.


Coincidentally, the themes and ideas that are brought up in this documentary are highly relevant to the ideas that we have been discussing in class. (In regards to the evolving relationship between humans and artificial intelligence.)


I have never heard of Ray Kurzweil before. And I apologize if someone has already made a post about him and I somehow overlooked it. I highly doubt it though since I have been keeping up with the blog throughout the semester.

Apparently, he is an inventor and a futurist who is known for his eerily accurate predictions about the future, in regards to technology. For instance, Kurzweil's book, The Age of Intelligent Machines was written during the late 1980s and published in 1990. In it, Kurzweil foretells the explosive growth of global Internet use that began in the 1990s:

"At the time of the publication of The Age of Intelligent Machines, there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world, and the medium was unreliable, difficult to use, and deficient in content, making Kurzweil's realization of its future potential especially prescient given the technology's limitations at that time. He also stated that the Internet would explode not only in the number of users but in content as well, eventually granting users access "to international networks of libraries, data bases, and information services". Additionally, Kurzweil correctly foresaw that the preferred mode of Internet access would inevitably be through wireless systems, and he was also correct to estimate that the latter would become practical for widespread use in the early 21st century." (Wikipedia)

In Transcendent Man, Ray Kurzweil discusses his most recent predictions which claim that the distinction between humans and artificial intelligence will eventually disappear. It's a very fascinating documentary and I highly recommend it.

Furthermore, here is an article written by Ray Kurzeil on The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine which was originally published in the Scientific American back in 1999. Go ahead and click on the link below to read the article.

The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine

If you would like to check out some more scholarly articles written by Kurzweil, go ahead and use the Google Scholar search engine and knock yourself out:

Ray Kurzweil Google Scholar search


Even if you find it difficult to take Kurzweil's predictions seriously, he does bring up some ideas and questions that are worth considering. Enjoy!

Marshall McLuhan quotes on technology and soceity

*"Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."
*"Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of the 19th century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature."
*"Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly."
*"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and therefore our tools shape us."

These quotes got me thinking about the connections between technology and society and how both are intertwined in a big dense web. However, another argument McLuhan makes is that making sense is still a human monopoly.

The Ultimate Machine

Here is a video of Claude Elwwod Shannon's Ultimate Machine, which Liu references in The Freudian Robot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ34RDn34Ws&noredirect=1

Check it out!

http://www.cybracero.com/

Living With Robots - a short film

http://www.youtube.com/user/Honda?feature=pyv&ad=9004256484&kw=robot#p/u/0/AF0WsvfG_nI

Why Cybraceros?

I was reading an interview with Alex Rivera, when I came upon this, "The humor
of Rivera’s work, and the bite of his critiques, can also be appreciated in
Why Cybraceros? (U.S., 1997), which uses an original 1940s promotional
film by the California Grower’s Council titled Why Braceros? to recount
the history of the bracero program in the United States and to present a
dystopic futuristic revamping of this program that imports the labor, but
not the workers, from Mexico to the United States." Clearly, Rivera had been playing with the ideas in Sleep Dealer for some time. The original "Why Braceros?" is very long, and dry at first, but stick with it. The ideals it expresses, especially about half-way in, are exceptionally important to Rivera's understanding of the dystopic future in Sleep Dealers. Here is the original video his "mock-promotional" is based on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in4wXocVgUQ

and here, is the Sleep Dealer prototype:

http://blog.altoarizona.com/blog/2010/04/why-cybraceros-a-mock-promotional-film-by-alex-rivera.html

MACHINE MAN

Marketing Surgical Innovation to Create the New You

MLK quote

After watching Sleep Dealers yesterday in class it made me think of this Martin Luther King Jr. quote, "We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-orientated' society to a 'person orientated' society."

Feminist Cyborg Theory - with a funny twist!

Peeping Urbannauts

Roxxxy the US$7,000 companion/sex robot

When it comes to technology, the sex industry is no laggard, and as robots become more human-like in their appearance and abilities, US-based company TrueCompany is poised to launch Roxxxy – the world’s first sex robot - that has many more capabilities than your average sex doll. Apart from having better defined physical features than previous dolls, Roxxxy has been programmed with her own personality and her manufacturers say she can listen, talk, carry on a conversation, feel your touch and respond to it, as well as move her private areas inside when she is being “utilized” to deliver an unforgettable erotic experience. There are even plans for a male version - Rocky the Robot.

Roxxxy is the ninth version of TrueCompanion’s sex robot. She began development in 2001.

“Our first sex robot, Trudy, was built in the 1990s and was not designed for resale. Rather, she was a test bed to refine techniques which we would later use in Roxxxy and Rocky TrueCompanion,” says designer and partner Douglas Hines.

While Roxxxy might look like a high-end quality doll, Hines assures us that the similarities end there.

Apart from her ability to move certain sections of her anatomy (her three high quality construction “inputs” as he delicately states) she also has a personality which is matched as much as possible to her owner's personality.

“So she likes what you like, dislikes what you dislike, etc. She also has moods during the day just like real people! She can be sleepy, conversational or she can ‘be in the mood’,” says Hines.

She even has an orgasm!

Roxxxy has a heartbeat and a circulatory system! The circulatory system helps heat the inside of her body.

Apart from the usual options sex dolls come with, purchasers can specify her hair color, hair style, skin tone, makeup selection, etc, (the company can also accommodate custom requests), Hines says Roxxxy owners may decide to have the sex robot use one of her five other pre-programmed personalities:

• Frigid Farrah – reserved and shy
• Wild Wendy – outgoing and adventurous
• S&M Susan – ready to provide your pain/pleasure fantasies
• Young Yoko – barely 18 and waiting for you to teach her
• Mature Martha – very experienced and would like to teach you!

And/or “you can build your own additional girlfriend personalities,” adds Hines.

“She interacts just like a human interacts,” says Hines. “She hears what you are saying as well as where you are touching her and responds as appropriately as possible.”

For instance, if you have Roxxxy using her “Frigid Farrah” personality and you touched her in a private area, more than likely, she will not be too appreciative of your advance. But if your Roxxxy is using the “Wild Wendy” personality, she will want you to do it again!

Roxxxy is flexible enough to allow owners to add to the five preloaded girlfriend profiles and change the existing five personalities to better suit their preferences.

Hines explains that it is possible to share girlfriends (other Roxxxy robots) with other owners by “swapping” them back and forth online.

“For example, you lend your custom-built girlfriend, ‘Sexy Susan’ to one of your friends online – but he can only ‘use’ her until Sunday morning and then she needs to be returned to you. Until Sunday morning, he can ‘engage’ your girlfriend by using your Sexy Susan personality with his Roxxxy sex robot. You also have the option of sharing your girlfriend with everyone in our forum if you would like. You will also have access to everyone else’s girlfriends, if they allow them to be shared.”

Hines says this is the same as wife or girlfriend-swapping without any of the social issues or sexual disease-related concerns.

“All of these features, which all of our sex robots share, make them truly a unique experience,” he says, proudly.

At present, Roxxxy models can only speak English but the company anticipates releasing Japanese, Spanish and German-speaking versions soon.

Hines says the company is pleased to have had thousands of requests to buy the sex robots and has had many inquiries with additional questions.

“When you decide to have your own Roxxxy, you will also be subscribed to a monthly support plan that will cover any general support questions as well as updates to your Roxxxy,” says Hines.

“Since the subscription service includes updates, she requires a link to the Internet via Wi-Fi. If necessary, you can hook her up to a network cable if you do not have wireless access at your location.”

Who are potential buyers of Roxxxy (and Rocky)?

Hines says the sex robots are helping individuals as well as couples spice up their sex lives as well as giving them a true companion (i.e. TrueCompanion) to share their most erotic fantasies or simply to have someone provide them with companionship and unconditional love.

“We also have many people that have hit a ‘dry spell’ in their love life or do not have many suitable mates living near them. Other couples want to experience a ‘threesome’. We are happy to make our customers’ dreams come true with their own TrueCompanion.”

For those worried about privacy, Hines states that all information is kept confidential. “Also, all billing and shipments reference the generic computer-sounding company name of our partner company: Data Software Solutions, LLC or Data Software Solutions Support. Roxxxy ain’t cheap. This top shelf gal’s base price is US$7,000 but as Hines attests, she’s not a sex doll, she’s a sex robot!

“We have a limited time deep discount program being offered as well as flexible payment plans."

Details are on the TrueCompanion website.

http://www.gizmag.com/roxxxy-us7000-sex-robot/14063/

More Human than Human

The White Zombie song, More Human than Human is inspired by Dick's novel and the line in Blade Runner claiming that the Rosen Company's Nexus 6 model is "more human than human".

Here's the Video and lyrics.

"More Human Than Human"

White Zombie (1995)

Yeah, I am the astro creep
A demolition style
Hell american freak, yeah
I am the crawling dead
A phantom in a box
Shadow in your head say
Acid, suicide freedom of the blast
Read the fucker lies, yeah
Scratch off the broken skin
Tear into my heart make
Me do it again yeah
Yeah [x4]

More Human Than Human
[x6]

Yeah, I am the jigsaw man
I turn the world around
With a skeleton hand say
I am electric head
A cannibal core
A television said, yeah
Do not victimize
Read the motherfucker
Psychoholic lies, yeah
Into a psychic war
I tear my soul apart and I
Eat it some more, yeah
Yeah [x4]

More Human Than Human
[x6]

Yeah, I am the ripper man
A locomotion mind
Love american style, yeah
I am the nexus one
I want more life fucker
I ain't done, yeah

More Human Than Human
[x8]

Motivation for "Do Androids...."

Still researching the last novel we read and came across this entry that I found interesting.
FROM IMDB:
Philip K. Dick first came up with the idea for his novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' in 1962, when researching 'The Man in the High Castle' which deals with the Nazis conquering the planet in the 1940s. Dick had been granted access to archived World War II Gestapo documents in the University of California at Berkley, and had come across diaries written by S.S. men stationed in Poland, which he found almost unreadable in their casual cruelty and lack of human empathy. One sentence in particular troubled him: "We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children." Dick was so horrified by this sentence that he reasoned there was obviously something wrong with the man who wrote it. This led him to hypothesize that Nazism in general was a defective group mind, a mind so emotionally flawed that the word human could not be applied to them; their lack of empathy was so pronounced that Dick reasoned they couldn't be referred to as human beings, even though their outward appearance seemed to indicate that they were human. The novel sprang from this.

The Future of Sex

I found this article that elaborates on what we were speaking about in class today in regards to sexuality in the film Blade Runner. The article looks at various items in regards to sex such as studies done on monkeys in response to pleasure all the way to Holodecks to fulfill every fantasy. The article gives an interesting look into the future of sex, asking what if?

Click Here For Sex

In addition below is a video of a short film titled Whats Your Fantasy? that I was introduced to while my team was competing during the 48 hour film festival in San Diego a few months back. This team did a funny piece on the future of sex by use of Holodecks, which the article above talks about. Hope you enjoy.

Barbies Are Us...

(mayracely AT ymail DOT com) has sent you this information from Yahoo! Shine.

Personal message:

I saw this blog post on Yahoo! Shine and thought that it might be interesting for the class. What it would take for a woman to look like a plastic doll.

The plastic surgery a model needs to look like Barbie - Fashion + Beauty on Shine

<http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/beauty/the-plastic-surgery-a-model-needs-to-look-like-barbie-2584798/>http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/beauty/the-plastic-surgery-a-model-needs-to-look-like-barbie-2584798/ 

Humanity and Technology

I read this interesting article called "A Cyborg's Testimonial: Mourning Blade Runner's Cryptic Images," by R. Pope in Film-Philosophy, volume 12, #2, p.1-16 in the September 2008 issue. Pope explains the linkages and separations between humans and technology. The article also goes over different images of cyborgs: liberal, fascist, cybernetic, cyberpunk, and cyborgpunk. Furthermore, the eternal question of philosophy or (how do we know we are human?) is addressed. There is so much ambiguity in Blade Runner, nothing seems to be certain, and one can get lost in the difference between the cyborgs and the humans, but the beauty of the film is the multiple readings!

Discussion of Post-Humanism and Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This article, "Cyborg Bodies and Digitized Desires: Posthumanity and phillip k. dick" by Jennifer Attaway, discusses the posthuman condition, problematizing the 'human' and desire present in Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I thought it especially relevant to our discussion of this text and technosexualities.


Abstract:

The interaction between human beings and intelligent machines has challenged the traditional understanding of what it means to be "human." In his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, phillip k. dick rethinks human identity through the positioning of human beings within a technologically mediated reality that displaces the biological body and the spontaneity of human sensation. Written in 1968, dick's novel anticipates the effect of a technologically mediated culture on the formation of a posthuman identity. dick's fictional juxtaposition of the human being and the organically anthropomorphic android complicates conventional implications of embodiment. Androids are physically indistinguishable from human beings and the only identifiable difference is the human ability to feel empathy, which is encountered prosthetically through an "empathy box." In Do Androids Dream? the body is bled of any definitively human quality while human internality is mediated by the machine. Using dick's novel as an illustration of the process of human redefinition, "Cyborg Bodies and Digitized Desires: Posthumanity and phillip k. dick" argues that the posthuman state is a disembodied condition informed by what is deemed "digitized desires."

Mexican Cinematic Technosexualities

source

Mike Davis on Apocalypse/Blade Runner...

From: shelley hernandez
To: memo@sdsu.edu
Subject: malas seminar 10-17


Greetings Bill,




I wanted to share this with the class...


http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-01-07-davis-en.html


This online journal had an interview with Mike Davis (we are studying his Planet of Slums book in the MALAS Comparative Cities class) and midway through the piece is a bit about "Blade Runner" and how Davis returns to the film often because of his interest in "the dystopian and apocalyptic".

Remember Tamagotchi?

I had an electronic pet once. I didn't feed it and it died. Lucky for me though, it had a reset button. For children too irresponsible for the real thing, Hasbro and other toy makers have been releasing battery operated pets for years. In my day, key-chain sized Tamagotchi pets were all the rage. Last Christmas, Zhu Zhu pet hamsters were flying off retailer's shelves. There is even a website where children (and perhaps adults) can own a completely virtual pet if caring for a three-dimensional piece of circuitry is too overwhelming. Check out the Webkinz!

Why do humans have such a compelling desire to own and care for small creatures? I wondered this as I read Dick's novel and saw Deckard's strange obsession and affection for both his electronic sheep and his eventual real goat. They seem to represent a sign of prosperity and status in the novel, much like cars do in our time. Even today when cats, dogs, fish, and birds are abundant, people seek to trap, own, and raise (what should be) wild animals, sometimes spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on their care. And now, children are being groomed for the real thing with technological toy pets (so much for the pet rock). I guess they're are all just practicing for the eventual extinction of our fellow animal species.

Future Apocalypses...

click the robots above for the source
 and a treasure trove of EC comics ephemera!

Mechanical Dolls

This fashion photography reminded me of Blade Runner...

source

Novels, Technology, and Sex.

Here's a quote that I found on the Kurt Vonnegut twitter page today. It reminded me of the study of technosexualties :).

"I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex."

-Kurt Vonnegut

A Reminder from a Sex Robot: Evolution of a Sex Robot

Not only is Roxxy used for sex, but she can carry on simple conversations.  Because that is what I want in a sex doll...personality.

A very interesting article from a Christian perspective.

Dick on Blade Runner

I found this letter that Philip K. Dick supposedly wrote to Jeff Walker (a studio exec, I think?) in 1981 after viewing a TV interview with Harrison Ford regarding the release of the film Blade Runner. I found the letter on several other websites and it seems to be authentic (but you never know). In it, Dick agrees with Ford's points, saying that the "futurism" concept that the film lays out is more reality driven than sci-fi or escapism. The link has Dick's typed letter and a transcription below it which is easier to read.

EYEGIENE // retrogasm: Bride of the Robot

EYEGIENE // retrogasm: Bride of the Robot

MAC in 1984

As many of us mourn the passing on Apple co-founder Steve Jobs I'd like to share the commercial that introduced Macintosh to the world.

The Problem with Internet Porn

After a girlfriend of mine "gave it up" to a guy she had been dating she decided it wasn't going to work out.

"Why? That bad, huh?" I asked.

"It was OK. It was just OBVIOUS that he watches too much porn."

"Wha?"

"All his moves were porn-like. A bunch of purposeless thrusts and at one point he slapped my boob. SLAPPED MY BOOB! Why would any man think that would be a turn on for me if he hadn't seen some bimbo moan to it on You Porn?"

And that is when I found out about You Porn...

Porn, as it turns out, is not only an unreliable tutor for love making, but according to an article I found on Psychology Today, internet porn is also causing Erectile Dysfunction in 20-somethings.

Click on the link for the details.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201107/best-july/the-problem-porn

Beetles Banging Beer Bottles

The relation of people to their objects is an interesting subject that often causes more than just junk to arise. But in this case it is junk, or discarded beer bottles that pique the interest of these brown beetles.

They mount these brown bottles and attempt to copulate until they die.


It makes one wonder, if all the attractive parts of a beetle can be fulfilled by a bottle by accident, could we humans manufacture something that overshadows the other sex(beyond of course Real Dolls and other such objects)?

Speaking of Sex Machines...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrFzB3CvU9M

F-Machine

Now that I've presented incriminating evidence in class today, why not put it in writing? You know, so there's actual proof out there that I will never be able to run for office. Jumping off from Mary Roach's Bonk, the conception for this machine came just as described in the book, "The typical scenario, Archibald says, is a married guy who likes building things. He comes across someone else's machine, is fascinated, decides to build one himself. He presents it to his wife, who goes, 'Wha?' and then he sells it on eBay" (55). While ours hasn't seen the likes of an internet auction, it hasn't stopped my partner from fantasizing that one day he may just mass-produce and sell these (along with his fantasy of becoming a Jedi warrior... not sure which one takes precedence). Although it's nothing like "dating a corn dog" (55), it does lack "warmth... personality, arms and legs, a head, a soul" (57). I wonder if the folks over at KitchenAid would be appalled if they knew what their bread makers are really being used for!

Picture and video of our F-Machine and how it works (minus attachments), courtesy of the huzzzband.

Don't you love that our baby bassinet is in the background? :-/

Female Hysteria

Thought it would be interesting to see what was out there about the old notion of "female hysteria" - especially after reading in Bonk about the doctor office treatments for women suffering such 'disease'. Check it out:

http://19thcentury.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/female-hysteria/

Female hysteria

December 5, 2007 by 19thcentury

In 1859, it was claimed that a quarter of all women suffered from hysteria. This number makes sense if you consider that there was a 75-page catalogue with possible symptoms, and this list was seen as incomplete. Some of the symptoms of female hysteria are faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, muscle spasms, shortness of breath, irritability and a loss of appetite for food.
The exact cause of hysteria is not clearly defined, except that is was a ‘womb disease.’ According to the Victorians, it had either to do with pent-up fluids in the female body, stress of modern-day life, or the ‘wanderings of the womb.’ It was definately an upper-class disease, an American physician expressed pleasure that the country was ‘catching up’ to Europe in the prevalence of hysteria.

Luckily, there was a temporary solution for hysteria (hysteria was a chronic disease so it could never be fully cured.) The woman suffering from hysteria would go to the doctor for a ‘pelvic massage to the point of hysterical paroxysm.’ The doctors thought this to be a very tedious task indeed, and due to this, the first vibrators were invented: around 1870 the first ones were in use by physicians.