"We have to infiltrate that pod of belugas, find out what they're plotting. But how to do it? Any one of us would be spotted immediately ... "

Gack, I never meant to suggest 'primitive' (pre-scientific?) people were stupid. Quite the contrary. Their reasoning ability is/was every bit as good as ours, and their capacity to make observations and note correlations might be superior. They may not know _why_ - in scientific terms - something happens, but they…

I would imagine that the whale-poison discovery process went something like this:

"I am uncertain," said Pshshllr-14.

"I am uncertain," said Pshshllr-14.

The Stoics used to make a point of thinking about loss (the death of those close to them or the loss of the things that they valued, but also their own deaths) as a mental exercise. The purpose was to encourage them to value what they had. It sounds as if this is a similar concept. [en.wikipedia.org]

"Lesbianism equals vampirism ... equals seriously don't do that."

And yet, all it would take is five or six beers ...

A female stand-up comic (I forget who, sorry) said that men's stages of drunkenness could be summed up as "happy, happy, horny, fighty, dead", and women's as "happy, happy, happy, happy, crying on the stairs".

Now I want to see a Lovecraft mythos "Missed Connections":

Past visions of life in the future always include monorails, but they don't seem to have caught on. Would the monorail have been more successful if we'd had fewer elephants leaping out of them ... or if we'd had more?

According to wikipedia, hyraxes (aka dassies) can range from about 2kg to 5kg, making them either half the size or approximately the size of an average house cat. I'm not sure that the adjective "tiny" really applies (unless you're comparing them with their elephant relatives).

I want to know if you can change people's drinking habits by covering them with temporary tattoos.

The 'environmental impact' report is going to make interesting reading.

Niven's "Known Space" is some of my favorite SF; his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle some of my least. I'd always assumed that Niven was the kinder, gentler, smarter counterpart to Pournelle's trademark conservative blowhard, and that the things I didn't like about the N/P books were down to Pournelle.…

Yeah, yeah, it's just a harmless alarm-bot. But let me remind you that the South Koreans also invented this: [www.youtube.com] It's only a matter of time before someone puts the two together, and we know what happens after that.

Next year's blockbuster feature film: "Robotart"

Are Scots replacing the English as the go-to group for supplying sinister movie villains? I've been thinking about a career change, and I could see myself making a lateral move into villainy. From what I've heard, the hours are pretty good and you get to cackle maniacally a lot and threaten people, which sounds fun.…

Required reading for anyone interested in chatbots is Lenny Foner's "What's an agent anyway?", about the Julia chatbot: [bit.ly]

I'd love to listen in on the design meetings.