Saturday, January 7, 2012

Search for Dry Dock

THE SEARCH FOR DRY DOCK
YIKES!!! I don't know if the the Big Brain is angry, upset, or fully cognizant of what happened. The emotion chip is not yet fully installed. Maybe that's a good thing.

Will the Big Brain hide under the bed like da-Chong, a big BS1 Bug?
It has rained day and night here for three weeks, mostly nonstop. As a result, there's a water leak!!! A pan can catch the temporary drips, but these drops could be highly damaging and deadly harmful to the Big Brain. Did we remember to waterproof the Big Brain??? I wonder why that was never suggested when the project was getting started. What if the Brain fell into a swimming pool or a bottle of soft drink fell into it the boards and Propeller processor arrays? What if the Brain went outside for a Robotic Blob Walk and it started to rain? Or the ceiling dripped!!! The drip will need to be fixed immediately and the brain may end up hiding under layers of plastic wrap until the repair work is completed. So now there's a delay for Big Brain to fully move into its snugly Crypt, at least until we can guarantee a dry dock. In the mean time, the Brain will fully operate on main floor, using a rigged bi-parted home station. This may be comprised of rows of cardboard boxes placed end to end to act as big lab benches. Currently a wood bench, inverted by 90-degrees, is in use.

If the Brain must hide under the plastic wrap, it reminds me of the fictional story by Franz Kafka, "The Metamorphosis," published in 1915. It's a story of a traveling salesman that awakes to find himself transformed into a giant bug and ends up hiding under the bed! On the surface, Gregor’s story seems simple enough. He wakes up, he’s a bug. (Kafka establishes early on that his transformation is not a dream.) But what kind of bug is thisungeheueren Ungeziefer? Translations vary from “gigantic insect” to “monstrous vermin”; at one point a maid calls him a dung beetle, and Vladimir Nabokov has drawn a very helpful picture. Most people think of a cockroach, which is more an instinctual reaction of disgust than anything else. However, the physical details are unimportant, and Kafka insisted that published editions of The Metamorphosis contain no actual illustrations of the bug. What matters is that the main character has become something despicable, horrifying, and yet kind of funny – a scurrying little chaos hiding behind the bedroom door. Link