Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

Well, today certainly has been a day of revelations. First Monk-E-mail, then the top searched keywords at NYTimes.com, then, on my drive from New York to Philly, I discovered that I know all the lyrics to Debbie Gibson's "Lost in Your Eyes" like they were written in my soul. And now, there's RoboCup.

Did you people know about RoboCup and you were just holding out on me? For shame, procrastinators. For shame.

For those of you who have not been cruelly withholding vital information and have no idea what I'm talking about, let me explain. RoboCup is, apparently, an international organization of scientists-cum-sports-enthusiasts dedicated to the development of "a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team" by the year 2050. There are a number of branches to this revolutionary endeavor, mostly oriented toward soccer, whether played by tiny robots, medium-sized robots, robot dogs, or full-sized humanoid robots, but there is also something called RoboCup Junior that hosts an annual dance competition in which "one or more robots wear costumes and move creatively to music."

I swear to you, I am not making any of this up.

I was alerted to the goings-on of the robot soccer world by my Providence correspondent, Z, who forwarded the following announcement by the Brown University RoboCup Club:

The Brown Robocup Club will be hosting a robot soccer demonstration Tuesday May 9th between 1-4pm in the CIT Lobby. Robocup is a world-wide effort to create robots that can win in soccer against the human World Cup Champion. Toward this goal, we will exhibit Sony Aibo robot dogs facing off in 4-on-4 soccer matches. These robots play soccer autonomously based on computer programs written by our team of Brown undergraduate and graduate students. Additionally, a remote control interface will be available for visitors to control a robot player during the matches. This interface provides a first person sense of playing robot soccer.

Were you so tickled by the clever pun in "toward this goal" that you were seduced into thinking that "we will exhibit Sony Aibo robot dogs facing off in 4-on-4 soccer matches" was a perfectly normal way to complete a sentence? I was, briefly. Then the questions started pouring in. Who knew that Brown had a robot soccer team? Are we so acclimated as a culture to the idea that dogs can play soccer that we're ready to accept robot dogs playing soccer? Shouldn't the dog version really be called RoboPupCup? And what could a "first person sense of playing robot soccer" possibly mean?

I am having a strange day.

A final note on The Da Vinci Code, which I finished last night: if this book is to be believed, it takes a brainiac team including a well-published British Royal Historian, a world-famous Harvard symbologist, and a Parisian forensic cryptologist about 75 pages to solve a riddle that a young junior professor of 18th-century literature can figure out before reading the last line. I'm not kvetching, and I'm not boasting. I'm just saying that I think I should be more famous and better paid.

I did keep turning the pages right up until the very end, too enthralled with yelling the answers and impending plot twists to the characters even to get up and refill my wine glass. Which, in this reader's estimation, is a pretty fun way to spend a cold evening.

OK, enough of this Dan Brown business. When was the last time we had a good shark post? Or, for that matter, a good robot post? Do you see where I'm going here? Could it be ... robot sharks?

Pretty damn close. According to Discovery News, the Pentagon is funding research into neural impants that will turn everyday, run-of-the-mill sharks into "Stealth Sharks."

"The Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails," said the report, carried in Saturday's edition.

"By remotely guiding the sharks' movements they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted," the article said.

Without even mentioning the ethical issues of taking endangered wild animals and transforming them into remote-controlled drones of the U.S. military, it seems to me that this is a Very Bad Idea. Have these people never seen The Day of the Dolphin (the Oscar-nominated film in which George C. Scott and his hot lab-partner/wife teach dolphins to speak English by forging creepy paternal bonds with them and then watch in horror as their humanoid dolphin-son is abducted and used in a plot to assassinate the president)? Have they never seen Deep Blue Sea (in which a team of scientists have the bright idea to cure Alzheimer's by injecting mako sharks with a serum to make their brains grow really, really big and then are shocked when the sharks get really, really smart and take over the lab and eat everyone, including LL Cool J's parrot)? Is our government really funding a project to develop A Button that controls the minds and wills of a global Army of Sharks? Is no one on the Pentagon's payroll to ask questions like, What if the bad guys happen to get the shark remote? What if rewiring the brains of the ocean's most ferocious and ancient creatures doesn't exactly line up with the current national agenda? What if the sharks turn out to be as clever as they are in every movie scenario of this sort and turn around and eat us all en route to inheriting the earth?

For the second time in this post, I cannot help but feel that I have untold marketable skills that are not being put to use.

Ever take a few days off from the internet news media and then realize upon your return that the world really is as weird as you imagine it is?

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Item 1: Sony has pulled the plug on Aibo the Robot Dog, to the dismay of robot-dog owners throughout the land.

"Aibo is so symbolic of Sony quality I'm starting to lose faith in Sony's audiovisual products," said Hashimoto, a longtime fan of the company whose every home appliance practically is a Sony.

"The robot is like a real dog. It responds when I call it," he says. "It's so cute. It sulks. And it looks sad when things don't go right."

Paul Wallingford, the owner of a Los Angeles-based Internet business, owns four Aibos. Lately, he's been keeping them turned off often so they're less likely to have problems.

"I think you do develop an attachment to them," he said by telephone.

An "attachment," eh? Is that what you call this?

Owners have created fan clubs around the world, and some even dress up their canine robots like babies.

Now, the death of a robot affects me every bit as much as it does anyone with a heart who grew up in the age of Short Circuit (Number 5 is alive!). But what with the dressing-up-robot-dogs-like-babies stuff, I think perhaps Sony is performing an important public service in this case.

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Item 2: According to science, bat brains are inversely proportional in size to bat testicles.

The study offers evidence that males—at least in some species—make an evolutionary trade-off between intelligence and sexual prowess, said David Hoskens, a biologist at the Center for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter in England and a leading authority on bats' mating behavior.

"Bats invest an enormous amount in testis, and the investment has to come from somewhere. There are no free lunches," said Hoskens, who did not participate in the study.

I feel it would be too simple to make some quip about the allegorical richness of this finding at the expense of male beefcakes, so I'll satisfy myself with pointing out that there is no scientific evidence linking the size of female bat brains to the size of their hooters. The female of the species has apparently better honed the economy of intellectual and sexual energies.

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Item 3: Drug dealers used cute little puppies as heroin mules!

Oh no they didn't, you say. But yes, they did:

Colombian smugglers turned puppies into drug mules by surgically implanting them with packets of liquid heroin, authorities said.

Investigators believe the ring used the dogs, as well as people who swallowed the drugs, to conceal millions of dollars of heroin on commercial flights into New York for distribution on the East Coast.

The authorities are understandably outraged ... about the puppies:

It was unclear how many dogs might have been used in the smuggling scheme, [John P.] Gilbride [head of the DEA's New York office] said.

"I think it's outrageous and heinous that they'd use small, innocent puppies in this way," he said.

That guy Orlando Tobon who has devoted the last 15 years or so to raising money for decent burials for human drug mules should take note. Everyone knows puppies are more lovable than poor people.

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Item 4: And finally, once again, citizens of the most powerful nation in the world wait with bated breath for a giant rodent to predict the future.


This morning at Gobbler's Knob (actual name, I swear) Punxsutawney Phil (pictured here—the one without the hat) communicated with that remarkable eloquence unique to the groundhog species that we're in for a long winter. Inevitably, Phil was aggressively appropriated to a number of political causes as various factions "latched on to the Phil frenzy for a publicity boost—for just about anything, from global warming to the lottery":

The National Environmental Trust said it's [sic] groundhog-suit-wearing human "will ignore his shadow and will instead rely on global warming evidence to forecast an early spring."

The American Physiological Society was offering experts to discuss "What Punxsutawney Phil can teach us about surviving massive blood loss, preventing muscle atrophy, and more."

The Pennsylvania Lottery even has Gus, "the second most famous groundhog in Pennsylvania," who implores lottery players to "keep on scratchin'."

None of those things are really what Groundhog Day is about, said Mike Johnston, a member of the Groundhog Club's Inner Circle. Punxsutawney Phil is nonpolitical and can't speak anyway, Johnston said.

Thank god we have the Groundhog Club to call us back to earth. As I always say—where there be grown men in top hats who form a fan club for a giant rodent, there be the voice of reason in America today.

One of my informers on the robot front has just alerted me to this story:

Japanese scientists invent the Robo-Roach



Do these people not read science fiction? Do they not know that this is a blueprint for a particularly disgusting and gory end to the human race? Are they unaware of the role they are playing in the horror story that is our collective destiny, or are they simply indifferent?

Oh, wait. They're Asian. Obviously, this is the next chapter in the Oriental conspiracy to transform the free world into an undifferentiated mass of remote-controlled automatons. Even John Stuart Mill told us this would happen—go back and read "On Liberty." Of course, there, the menace is Chinese, not Japanese, and the "robot" was still conceived as the "slave to despotism." Same difference, all around. Is it any coincidence that they singled out American cockroaches? First our bugs, then our men.

Okay, secretly I kind of want one. It's the Chinese in me.

It's one of those days.

On the one hand, we seem to be living in a farce: Giant Popsicle Melts, Floods Union Square

( Article text )

With news like that, who needs The Onion?

On the other hand, we seem to be living in the future: Japanese Robot Guards to Police Shops and Offices

( Article text )

I need to finish my dissertation today, so I don't have time to pontificate on the subject of "Guardrobo D1." You can read earlier robot pontifications here.

I've been distracted lately by thoughts of the advertisement I saw in the Feb. 14 & 21 New Yorker for ASIMO, Honda's new domestic robot. I've been seeing ads for ASIMO periodically for a while, in such literate publications as The New Yorker and Harper's Monthly; it seems he's been in production for fifteen years or so. He's not yet for sale, so don't go tearing over to Amazon or anything, but Honda is already marketing "the dream" he represents:

( click to read how We're building a dream, one robot at a time. )

Now, my initial reaction was a feeling I have with increasing frequency these days—that startling realization that I'm living in the future, and it looks just like sci-fi always said it would. The photograph filling the top half of the full-page ad shows a happy, all-white, all-American family collected for a family photo in front of their large suburban house and pristinely mowed lawn. The family is organized on the steps in a kind of circle, with a faceless, waving ASIMO at its heart. The trinity of mom, dad, and son-in-football-jersey stand behind ASIMO, dad at the top of the circle, the head of the family; a pretty daughter sits on the steps at mom's feet, and a golden retriever smiles in that family-dog way at the bottom of the frame. Incidentally, the careful arrangement of this tableau also creates a chain of descent suggesting a domestic hierarchy that goes dad-mom/son-ASIMO-daughter-dog. I hope the girl's stiff grin belies a bedroom plastered with Bikini Kill posters and a desk full of morbid poetry and pissed-off punk lyrics. And I hope the retriever dreams of killing things. But my point is that, as persuasive as the idea of a friendly neighborhood ASIMOV to do the dishes, tend the baby, and assist the elderly may be, the dream that is being marketed here is an old one, that of domestic servitude, and one that was fulfilled years ago in this country by the institution of slavery. I'm not suggesting that ASIMO is a slave. But isn't it strange that the whole gruesome spectacle of the slave-owning family, or of the more recent and less horrid though still socially suspect phenomenon of hired domestic "help" (in fact, ASIMO's placement in the photo is analogous to that of Alice's in the Brady Bunch opening sequence), is so easily rendered heartwarming simply by replacing the abject slave/servant with a robot? That the humanlike nonhuman is such a perfect solution to the pesky problems and embarrassments of contemporary humanism?

Perhaps you think I'm making too much of ASIMO. I probably am—that's what I get paid to do. But consider the article I found in the Technology section of yesterday's NYTimes on the "new model army soldier", which informs us that "the robot soldier is coming."

( Read more about the robot soldier )

All these robot dreams bring into stark relief the real limits of the humanist imagination, which is always trying to identify the nonhuman to bear the burdens no self-respecting person could ask of a fellow human being, but which are unfortunate necessities in the world we live in. ASIMO seems friendly enough, but he's a device to disavow the embarrassment of American domestic servitude; he helps us say, "Yeah, that slavery thing was a real tragedy, but we just didn't realize that we were enslaving humans. Now we've fixed that." The robot soldier is ammunition against the shame, dispair, and outrage we feel when we catch a glimpse of the mangled body of a U.S. soldier, or the ugliness of many veterans' lives, or of the spectacle of a family in mourning. The robots enable us to defer the question of why we live the way we do, why we dream the dreams we dream, why we wage these wars at all.

By the way, ASIMO is currently on tour. If you'd like to "meet ASIMO 'unplugged'" (Honda's words, not mine), you can track his progress around the country at his website.