I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

Nerds, check out this chat on the Post's site. There was an online Q&A with the author of a book on how to survive a robot uprising. The thing is, the guy's got a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon. And he's a funny, funny dork. The discussion degenerated into a series of pop-Internet-culture reference. He's definitely "with it." A snippet:

Reston, Va.: I remember seeing a commercial on an old Saturday Night Live with Sam Waterson pitching "robot attack insurance" to elderly people. Do you believe this would be a wise investment?

Daniel H. Wilson: Heck yeah it's a wise investment. Didn't you see the pie chart!?

43% of old people die from heart disease, and 57% die from robot attack.

A wise investment indeed!

Google screws up

Yesterday, I signed up for Google Analytics, a new tool provided by everybody's favorite verb. The idea of the service is that you paste a little snippet of JavaScript on all your pages, and then Google tracks information about the people who visit your site. There's plenty of software already out there that does this kind of thing (I run one on my home web server that provides plenty of interesting reports and graphs), but since I get a boner for all things Google, I thought I'd check it out. The only problem is that the site's been working slower than a government bureaucrat during a fire drill.

When I signed up (on my lunch break yesterday), I was told that Google was scanning this blog and preliminary results would be available by midnight. 31 hours later, still nada. Their site seems slower every time I visit it. Maybe it's the /. effect, maybe I'm a low priority, maybe their code is really inefficient. Whatever the case, I want my money back.

Is Google getting sloppy?

Your tuition hard at work

If Silber makes $1.25 million a year, then there are at least 42 BU students whose tuition pays for nothing but his salary.

If there are 25,000 undergrads, then there's a .2% chance you're one of them.

If you went to school for 4 years (assuming they rotate the students who pay Silber off each year), then there's more than a 1 in 100 chance your check went directly into his pocket.

If a typical person has 100 friendly aquaintences at school, then at least one of you is a sucker.

Of course, I doubt the survey took into account the value of his wood-panelled office on the top of SMG. There are certain things a university president just expects.