Mind Scalpel

I’ve been trying to ignore the insults that Sergey Brin’s throwing at me via his little automated-ridicule-generator (also known as Google AdSense), but I’m beginning to take umbrage at the subjects of the ads appearing most frequently on this blog. A small sample, with comments (and the irony is that by listing these ads, I am driving up the likelihood that they’ll be displayed even more often):

• “Scalp Problems?” — THIS is the best this multi-billion-dollar internet juggernaut can do when confronted by the word “Scalpel”? We’re doomed, I tell you, doomed!
• “Relationship Counseling” — Yeah, I think I’ll get some counseling…ON THE INTERNET. That will work well.
• “Fix Your Marriage” — Doing just fine, thanks! All four of them! So far none of them’s found out about the others!
• “Inside a Boyfriend’s Mind” — Women always say they want to know what men are thinking. Trust me, they don’t. As Larry Miller says, if they did, they’d never stop slapping us.
• “Do Men Want Intimacy?” — Arrgh! No. We want food, big flat-screen televisions, and maybe private jets.

So trust me, Sergey — I’m keeping track, here. You’re on my list for when the Revolution comes, my friend.

But in the meantime, keep those checks coming.

And hey, all you readers — keep clicking on those ads!

Apologies for the short gap in posting. I’ve been thinking about how to respond to a surprising “cease and desist” letter I received last week. Normally, these things shower down upon me like snow in January, to as little effect, but this one was different.

You see, it was signed by a few people whose name I recognized: Bill Gates (yeah, the Microsoft guy — former minion of mine, now in open rebellion, due for a comeuppance, long story), Sergey Brin (Google, same basic siutation), Jeffrey Bezos (CEO of amazon.com) and Pierre Omidyar (EBay dude).

Rather than try to summarize the letter, I’ll just reproduce it here in its entirety:

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Technologists are eternal optimists, in that they blithely assume that their new products will never turn manifestly evil.

But of course, even the most innocuous inventions can misfire, even when one is not actively seeking to use them for harm (and don’t let any guy fool you — the first thing any normal guy thinks when he’s confronted with a new device or technology is “How could I break this?” Another part of him is only a step behind, thinking “How can I use this as a weapon?” A slightly lower layer, a sort of ever-present meta-theme permeating all guys’ thoughts, of course, is “How can I use this to attract the babes?” ).

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So, what’s all this fuss about the South Korean company that’s offering to clone your pets? Okay, granted, there is one small issue, mainly that the people who are rich enough to have this done tend to have offensively annoying pets, and therefore we could be polluting the world with more of these (click at your own risk). Still, one could engage in countermeasures by cloning big, fierce, poodle-eating hell mastiffs, so it could end up being a self-compensating system.
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Given the U.S.’s recent successful shootdown of its own satellite, some people have suggested I post a piece I circulated a little while back on a private list. So, here it is, with an addendum.

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As a parent of young children, I have developed a low-cost solution to the nation’s ballistic missile defense needs: Three-year-olds!

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Because relentless Valentine’s Day advertising by DeBeers (subtle hidden message to him: “if you buy her a diamond, she’ll sleep with you!”; subtle hidden message to her: “if he doesn’t buy you a diamond, you shouldn’t sleep with him!”) doesn’t make people insecure enough this time of year, now comes the Wall Street Journal to report that, through advanced brain imaging technology, it is now possible to scientifically confirm the existence of true, unending love.

This immediately eliminates the comfortable illusion clung to by much of the populace that people who claim they still feel like teenagers towards each other are either 1) mentally deranged or 2) lying through their teeth. It’s about as cruel as scientifically proving that billionaires really are ecstatically happy, leading deeply fulfilling lives, and regarding less-wealthy people as substantially inferior to themselves, rather than, say, walking around with fake smiles while they’re screaming inside.
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Some blogs and web sites review consumer products by giving you useless and irrelevant information like price, ease of use, feature sets and quality.

Not this one! Here, we’re just concerned with the things that really matter about products – the social problems they solve, or introduce, in real life, not some ridiculously objective findings derived from some comprehensive, carefully-considered, long-term test.

Take, for example, those fancy GPS navigation units that everyone is getting in their cars (and, concomitantly, getting stolen from their cars, which, in my opinion, is just about the height of irony – “Hey, what happened to your highly-precise satellite-linked geolocation unit?” “I don’t know! I have no idea where it is!”).

It’s true, I finally got one as a gift, and I’ve been using it with some success, but mostly with catastrophic failure. So, to save some of you GPS novices out there from some traps for the unwary, I have put together a few pointers from bitter personal experience:

• Your GPS unit cannot be used as a substitute for visibility out of your windshield! So, no driving in total fog, white-out conditions, or while waiting for your windshield to defrost by referencing only your GPS screen. Turns out that in spite of its resemblance to a “heads-up display” there’s a slight mismatch between where your GPS is showing you to be on that steep mountainside road and where you actually are on the steep mountainside road. So scrape that windshield!

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As part of my Secret Plan for Global Domination, I have of course been developing an army of nigh-invulnerable, genetically-engineered super-soldiers, which, as Steven Covey would say if he were a would-be Global Despot rather than a self-help guru, is a “Quadrant II” activity for evil geniuses. (Incidentally, when I execute Phase I of my Rapid International Takeover, self-help gurus will be in the first group against the wall; self-actualization will be irrelevant when everyone’s highest values will be whatever I dictate. But, I digress.)

Anyway, one typical downfall of standard evil geniuses who develop super-soldier armies is that their super-soldiers tend to rebel, often at the most inconvenient times. I’m not a standard evil genius; I’m an exceptional one. So a primary focus of my research and development activities has been not just on enhancing my minions’ physical abilities (strength, power, speed, reflexes, resistance to pathogens, ability to endure long car trips without bathroom breaks, etc.) and mental powers (situational awareness, rapid learning so they can be speedily grown in vats and quickly infused with appropriate skills, high aversion to daytime television, and so on), but also on ensuring that they will remain fanatically loyal to me.

So naturally I’ve been sticking electrodes in subjects’ brains and figuring out what can be done with them since, oh, heck, it’s been so long I can’t even remember. Perhaps you are now starting to understand a few of the reasons this blog is named “Mind Scalpel.”

That’s why I enjoy seeing news stories like this one, describing some “new” discoveries that I had developed and surpassed, in secret, years ago. See, some doctors are all excited that when they were poking around in the brain of a 50-year-old obese guy in search of the “don’t eat so much, knucklehead” synaptic center of his brain, they discovered that their patient recalled, in great detail, a scene from 30 years before:
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Proving that computers radically increase the efficiency with which people can commit world-shattering screwups, one 31-year-old French guy banging on a keyboard managed to aerosolize $7 billion of his bank’s assets.

This is remarkable, not least because the French are notoriously averse to any sort of serious, sustained effort at pretty much anything other than the courtship of former supermodels or protesting the removal of 35-hour work week limitations. So either this Jerome Kerviel guy was an unusually industrious Frenchman, or technology was the force-multiplier that enabled this market-crashing trainwreck.

As is sometimes the case, a seemingly unrelated news story occurring at about the same time as the above event provides a good illustration of the magnitude of this event. I am referring, of course, to the recent headlines about a Japanese chimpanzee who proved better at memorization than an international memory expert.

This naturally led me to wonder how Monsieur Kerviel might stack up against a competing monkey for monetary-destruction skills.
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I know you’ve heard the commercials — you’re driving along, listening to the radio, and suddenly some guy says in an incredibly matter-of-fact voice “Hello, my name is Stan O’Hanlahan…”.

And then the hushed, minor-key Piano Chord from Hell plays: “*PLING*”

Stan O’Hanlahan then, incredibly matter-of-factly, spends the next thirty seconds describing an escalating odyssey into Disease Hell that begins with him talking about how he was a normal guy, just driving along listening to the radio, and segueing rapidly (but still incredibly matter-of-factly) into a series of health disasters, most always involving some form of cancer, and usually tossing in a tidbit of soul-crushing detail (”and then my eyes exploded” or “I tried to hug my daughter but my arms fell off”) that is clearly designed to freak you out, finally moving on to how the drug company selflessly developed a life-saving cure that brought him back to normal (with a realistic and lawyer-inspired note of caution, like “of course, this doesn’t work for everyone, and I still have no eyes/arms, but…”) while the music changes from the minor key to a major key, the joyous oboe kicks in, and some soothing woman comes on and breathes the drug company’s name gently into your ear a few times.
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