Saturday links

It’s only taken about 40 years, but it looks like we’ve progressed from the entertaining Pirates of the Caribbean animatronics, to the ability to rent female robots, ostensibly for product demonstration. From Kokoro, the company responsible,

Absolutely looks like a real human! The “Actroid” humanoid, developed with a cutting-edge technology attract you with its human look-alike appearance and astonishing high expression ability.

Freaky. Can anyone say… Westworld?

# # #I wasn’t aware of this, but the late architect Phillip Johnson evidently had quite the fascist tendencies in the 1930s. Ed Driscoll has made a ten-minute video highlighting Johnson’s escapades, and the apparent manner such activities were later swept under the rug. Driscoll reports that Johnson, upon being allowed to accompany the Nazis into Poland, in 1939, wrote to a friend,

We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.

A short list of Johnson’s buildings includes:

• The Glass House
• The Seagram Building
• The AT&T Building (now the Sony Building)

Oh, another one of his buildings is… The Crystal Cathedral, in southern California.

# # #It seems that the University of Texas at San Antonio decided to create a code of honor for its students, in order to encourage them not to cheat or plagiarize. Unfortunately, a significant portion of the code was copied from the honor code at BYU. Said Daniel Wueste, director of the Rutland Center for Ethics at Clemson University in South Carolina,

Young people today have a different understanding of what in the way of ideas and words is property that can be taken without authorization…

That, and the obscenely easy task it is to now cut and paste large blocks of text.

Filed under: Culture • Ethics & Morality • Rusty

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