Saturday, October 4, 2014

From the Mind of the Lemming: Night Flight



Humans are adaptable critters. Or perhaps the Lemming should say "adapting."

For example, although they've got top-rate color vision and see well enough to avoid trees at twilight, humans are most sincerely not nocturnal. But instead of accepting a role as day-dwellers, they keep developing new ways to stay active: no matter where a sun is relative to the local horizon.

They do, however, seem to like feeling "in control," even when the actual work is getting done — and quite well — by their tech.

The Lemming recalls a time when a train's "driver" didn't tell the train's AI that he was stepping out of the vehicle — and ran after the train as it left without him.

Originally posted last week:

Thursday, January 16, 2014

NO! Don't Shoo... - - - GLIPNARF!!!!

Writing a post for another blog, A Catholic Citizen in America, my mind took me off on an tangent. Nothing unusual there.

It's almost on-topic for that post, but not quite: and the excerpt is a better fit with this blog.

Airman AB Glipnarf's Big Mistake

One of the very few 'UFO' reports that I think could plausibly involve extraterrestrial intelligence happened in northwestern Minnesota in 1979.

No, I do not think this is proof that We Are Not Alone: but the report is intriguing.

As a writer, I can imagine a story from the point of view of the space aliens: deputy sheriff Johnson could have startled the jittery crew of a vessel, maybe one that wasn't supposed to land in the first place. The alien equivalent of an Air Force AB shot at the patrol car before the commander could stop him/her/it: making a bad situation much worse.

What happens to Airman AB Glipnarf may depend on how many forms the commander needs to fill out; and whether the landing was the result of equipment failure, botched navigation, or something else.

Now I really should get back to work.

Vaguely-related posts:

Privacy Policy

Nothing spooky here.

These days it's important to have a "privacy policy" available: so here's mine.

I do not collect information on individuals visiting this blog. If you leave a comment, I'll read what you wrote: but I don't keep a record of comments, apart from what Blogger displays. (In other words, the only record of what you write or who you are will be what people see at the bottom of the post.)

I do collect information about how many hits this blog gets, where they come from, and some technical information. I use the WebSTAT service for this purpose - and all that shows is which ISP you use, and where it's located.

You can stop most of Webstat's data gathering by disabling cookies in your browser. I don't know why you would, but some folks do.

I'm also an AdSense affiliate, so Google collects information on what I've written in each post: but that's mostly my problem.

I'm also considering starting an affiliate relationship with DAZ Productions. You should be able to keep DAZ and Commission Junction, their provider of affiliate services, from collecting information by - again - disabling cookies in your browser.

And you can keep DAZ Productions from finding out anything about you, by not buying any of their products.

Again, I don't know why you would: but some folks do.

Or, rather, don't.