Finally, Someone Thought of the Robots

This is no ordinary add for some hoi-polloi travel service. This ad put laid-off employees back to work.

That's how Wired.com put it, and it's an apt description: The dollies controlling the cameras are robots that used to work in the auto industry.

I can't say they're used to a spectacular fashion in the ad, but given that these robots could ahve laid idle or at worst been thrown away, rather than re-used in a different way, it's significant. They could easily have ended up as piles of e-waste, while ad company Autofuss spent more money on special camera dollies. Instead, they went bargain-shopping and, using what they found, got the equipment they needed. Sounds like they had to learn how to operate the robots, but they would have had to do the same thing with for-built dollies anyway.

Look at This, Dear Liza, Dear Liza

There's a hole in the moon, dear Liza, dear Liza, there's a hole in the moon, dear Liza, a hole.

And the boffins think the best thing to fix this hole with would be a moon colony. This just might be the biggest space news to come out of 2010, and it's not even lunch yet.

I'd move there in a nanosecond, if there were room for out-of-shape technical writers in the imagined moon colony. Well, it would take more than that, what with moon inocculations, moon passports, moon boots and that pesky little chore of convincing the wife to move to a place even more barren and desolate than eastern Idaho, but what a trip that would be. And living in a lava tube, just like a lunar caveman. Colony could be established there before the decade is out, if we had a Kennedyesque drive to show up somebody -- maybe the Maldivians, since they're all worried about global warming and are buying up land all over the place to which they can move once the polar ice caps melt. I'd so be there. As a kid, I kind of expected that moon colonies would be very well established by the time 2010 rolled around, so imagine my disappointment.

Why make a moon colony? Why not? Makes more sense to me than another year of "Survivor" or "American Idol," though it'd probably be harder to get the young'uns as excited about living on the moon if they knew Sanjaya wasn't going to be there. That's why I propose: Send me. I'll drag four other human beings with me and they'll love it. Well, probably not, but they'd come with me. And I could be the first inane blogger on the Moon. Wouldn't that be exciting? I'm also well-practiced at writing emergency procedures. Certainly they must anticipate emergencies on the moon. I could help them mitigate the hazards of vacuum, meteorites, and attacks of maraduing rat-bird, there from Swallow Falls to eat the cheese. So you need a guy like me, excited at the prospect of being a moon pioneer, to get others interested. Forget sending teachers and senators and such. Send me. I'll Ray Bradbury them to death and you'll have 50,000 colonists there within twenty years. Of course, you'd better bring a few engineers as well. They're swell guys. I get along with them really well.