Euphorbia

I have photographed this plant many times but it always comes through with an interesting shot when I'm really hard up for a picture. In my mind I always call it a 'fractal plant' because it is such a perfect one. It's also full of a latex sap which is not water soluble, is dangerous to pets and causes me to break out in a rash if I get any on me so I approach it with caution...and gloves.

The ongoing saga of what my friend Terri calls 'my ordinary life' is that I dropped my phone in the water and it is dead.The reason I know it is dead is that I turned it on. I worked at first but then it died.  It is definitely dead. I looked up how one might resurrect a phone which has been dropped in the water and the first thing it said is that sometimes covering it with rice will dry it out, but only if you don't turn it on first.... What kind of advice is that? Reminds me of the Monty Python skit...'this parrot is deceased, gone to meet it's maker, has crossed the great divide. It is dead '

The second installment of our class on artificial intelligence and ethics was called 'A/I and the Ethics of War'. To me that is just an oxymoron. I think all war is unethical and immoral, but to the extent that there are some ethics that can be applied to war...don't shoot women and children or civilians...it all goes out the window when the weapons of war are 'smart'. If something goes wrong, who is to blame? 

We saw a really scary video made by Stuart Russell at the University of California showing a scenario in the future using a swarm of insect sized  'smart' drones that could be programmed by face recognition techniques to single out of a crowd and shoot specific individuals. It's enough to make you withdraw from Facebook but it will already be too late if anybody has ever tagged you on social media. The technology exists...the limiting factor is the life of the battery...

My friend Fran's comment was, 'Now I have something else to be scared to death of...'
OilMan's comment was, 'I think we were born at the right time.'

Next week will be autonomic vehicles...

Tomorrow I'll  get a new phone...and hope that the 'geniuses' at the Apple Store can resurrect the information from the dead phone from the cloud or wherever it is....