Saturday, July 12, 2014

Staind's Most Popular Song

So I think about computers. A lot. Too much. And the other day I was wondering why, whenever there was an evil murderbot threatening to exterminate mankind, the hero never thought to make a situation where the machine would have to divide by 0. Every math student knows that division by 0 is undefined, but when you try to do division by 0 with a computer it often causes an error. Try it on your calculator. Chances are, you'll get some equivalent of "Error" on the screen. If the program running the murderbot doesn't check for this, it will probably crash the system. So if you are ever in this situation, and the murderbot decides to have a verbal standoff with you, here is a handy script:
You: What is your evil plan, you bad bot!?
MB: TO TERMINATE ALL HUMANS
You: And how do you plan to do that, you dastardly device!?
MB: MAKE A GRID OF ALL INHABITED AREAS, AND MURDER LOGICALLY
You: And how will you go about dividing the area into grids, you sinister synthetic!?
MB: EASY. TAKE THE AREA OF THE LAND AND DIVIDE IT BY...
You: Zero??
MB: ERROR.
Explosions and so forth ensue, the world is saved, the masses cheer your name and whatever.

Speaking of murderbots and scripts, I once started to write a musical about murderbots. Specifically, a murderbot that catches the Empathy Virus, and before his system is able to quarantine and purge it a hidden registry key gets created which causes the kernel to run a 'feelings' system call before he murders. (This may not be entirely correct, because I sort of slept through my Operating Systems course, but it's close enough. Plus I have to give people something to fight about over the internet). Normally a murderbot that catches this virus is terminated, but because his systems check came back normal and his murder quotas were some of the highest ever he was deemed fit to continue by the murderbot council. He then goes on a quest, to reformat his OS so that he may aid and assist humans of all shapes and sizes, and thus break free from his murderous purpose.
Disney stopped answering my calls so it didn't really get anywhere unfortunately. I mean, we are talking about an untapped market here. So much potential! And a good lesson too. Plus it's a musical! You can take any old garbage and set it to music, and it becomes an instant hit!

So anyway, I hope the NSA doesn't have some sort of limit on the number of times the word 'murder' can be used in a blog, because then I would get flagged big time. IT IS SATIRE NSA FOLKS! PROTECTED FIRST AMENDMENT SPEECH I HOPE. And I'm getting into that weird rambling zone where my ideas just sort of barf onto the keyboard and aren't very coherent, so yeah that shall be it for now.

RANDOM FACT
I talked with the NSA for a while at a career fair. They said the pay wasn't very good, at least for linguists.

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