It’s a funky old Friday again, so once more, it’s time for fascinating stuff from the wonderful world of science.

First, we return once more to one of my all time favorite avenues of technological research. Long time readers with particularly keen memories will already know which one I am talking about. It’s been a fascination of mine ever since I was a kid watching the short lived sci fi show Automan.

I am talking, of course, of self driving cars. Woo hoo!

The latest development on that concerns some whiz-bang propellerheads over at MIT who have developed a system that prevents collisions by predicting the movements of other vehicles.

Right now, it’s proof-of-concept at best, but it’s still an impressive achievement. They took two remote controlled cars, put them on a looped “death track” guaranteed to put them in serious collision peril, and ran one hundred trials of their new system, and there was only one collision.

Still one more collision than we would want in a real world application, but not bad for a new kind of system.

What I particularly like about this system is the excellent methodology. Basically, they systematically broke all the aspects of driving down to their most basic elements, modeled those elements, and from that developed a predictive model that generates all the possible positions a vehicle can be in within the next few seconds, given its current position and trajectory.

They even included factors like whether or not the vehicle is in an intersection or on onramp.

I am very impressed that they were able to tackle such an enormous number crunching task and produce not merely useful results, but actually quite good results. Of course, part of the reason these sorts of tasks can succeed when they failed drastically in previous areas is that we now have computer chips capable of doing the staggeringly huge number of calculations required to do such impressive predictive modeling.

But still, hats off to the prime nerds at MIT for making it work!

Next up, a story I will admit is only science adjacent rather than directly science related, but still, I thought it was worth sharing with you nice people. It caught my eye both because it happened in the marvelously laid back city of Portland, Oregon, a place I lived for a while, and because… well, you will see.

It’s a story of ecology, nephrology, public works, and the difference between science and pragmatism.

The short version : drunk guy pees in one of the Portland reservoirs. Solution : flush the entire freaking eight million gallons of perfectly good drinking water at a cost of almost $40K.

Obviously, strictly in terms of actual public health threat, this is a massive overreaction. For one thing, urine is sterile, and even if it wasn’t, one guy’s drunken whizz is not going to be more than, at most, a quarter of a gallon going into 8 million gallons of water, thus making it one 32 millionth pee.

There’s homeopathic remedies that are stronger than that.

And really, do you think that open reservoirs don’t end up with a lot more pee (and worse) than that simply from the local biologically active wildlife? Realistically?

But of course, this goes into the realm of human taboo, and that’s not a reasonable thing. Were I the administrator involved, the most important factor would be, basically, does the public know this guy pissed in the reservoir? Because if they don’t know, and are not likely to know, then to me, the cost of replacing all the water is not justified.

But if they do know or are quite likely to find out, then you have no choice, only the full flush will do. The public has to be absolutely sure their water is clean, not just from a scientific or reasonable point of view, but from the point of view of our potent sense of taboo and disgust.

We’re not robots, after all. We’re irrational humans, and when it comes to those most profound of our taboos, the ones involving bodily wastes, there is almost no room for negotiation.

Flush that thing. And we shall never speak of this again.

Getting back to full on science, we have an exciting development in that rapidly blossoming real actual no longer science fiction field of nanotech : a self powering nanotech machine that can transmit wirelessly.

It derives its power from any source of vibration, which is nothing new. There have been vibration harvesting nanomachines for a few years now…. decades in nanotime.

But that’s all they could do. Keep going. You had to put power into them from the outside in order to even verify they were still working.

What makes this one the new hotness is that it has enough power to transmit a wireless signal all on its own, throwing the door wide open for all kinds of self-powering nanosensors that could send information from anywhere at all, forever.

After all, damn near everything vibrates, as optical astronomers trying to take long exposures will readily tell you. And once you get down to nanoscale, even the silicon molecules in the heart of Everest vibrate.

The applications for such eternal nanosensors are innumerable. A world where such sensors are cheap and plentiful would be an information-dense world, with trillions of these sensors feeding information to whoever wishes to look it up.

It’s this kind of thing that makes me think “I am truly living the future”.

It’s a wonderful feeling.

I have been pondering the role of the idiot (the fool, the dumb guy, the wet behind the ears new guy, etc) in comedy a fair bit lately, and just recently, some of it came into focus for me, so I thought I would share the results of my pondering with you, my loyal readers.

First off, we have to rough out a definition. A Comedy Idiot need not be an actual mentally handicapped person. They might just be a fish out of water, a country boy in the big city (Perfect Strangers) or a city boy in the country for the first time (Green Acres), a big time executive forced to live with their redneck family, and so forth. Or they could be a character who is not precisely stupid, but an airhead (like Phoebe on Friends), an eccentric (Kramer on Friends), or just plain shallow (Cat on Red Dwarf, though he may also be just plain dumb. )

So instead, we shall define the Comedy Idiot simply as any character who, for whatever reason, has a childlike simplicity to their view of the world, unsophisticated, yet accessible.

What is most important, in fact, is that whatever their putative problem or personality, they are fulfill their role(s) as Comedy Idiots, which can be any or all of the following :

1. The Idiot as Buffoon. This is the simplest, most common, and most broadly and widely appealing role of The Idiot. This is The Idiot simply as a person who does stupid things. often resulting in their own personal injury. A great deal of what is commonly referred to as “slapstick” in comedy circles fall under this role. Even small children understand this comedy.
2. The Idiot as Fool. One small step up in sophistication is The Idiot as someone who says stupid things. It might not seem like there’s a very large distinction to make between the saying of stupid things and the doing of stupid things, but it’s a very important step, because it is only via this step that the more intellectual layers of The Comedy Idiot are unlocked. As simply The Fool, The Idiot merely says things anyone of standard intelligence will recognize as incorrect. This type of comedy appeals to children just a little bit older, who have enough verbal intelligence and knowledge of the world to recognize the flaws in what people say.
3. The Idiot as Savant This is the beginning of The Satirical Idiot. In this role, the Idiot is used to make acute observations about the world from the point of view of someone who lacks the faculties of a fully functional and informed person and so simply describes and reacts to things as they appear, often cutting through a lot of complex obfuscation that hides the truth from the more ‘normal’ people around them. The use of The Idiot in this way is often mixed in with the other, simpler roles, in order to keep the satirical “even an idiot like X can see… ” edge sharp. Homer Simpson is a perfect example of this. The Comedy Savant Idiot also opens the door for the next level…
4. The Idiot As Innocent A very powerful role for the idiot, of whatever stripe, is to retain, along with a childlike intellect or outlook, a child’s innocence, and hence operate as a sort of child substitute to act as the inner child lost in the adult world in all of us. We feel for the idiot, and even identify with them in some level, precisely because we all retain the child within.
5. The Idiot as Conscience Closely related to The Innocent Idiot is the Idiot as Conscience. Because of their childlike point of view, the Comedy Idiot has the uncomplicated morality of a child, and can therefore function as constant reminder to the more sophisticated characters of what it was like before they had to make moral compromises, and even guide them back to their real morality after losing their way in the confusion of adulthood. Forrest Gump (as portrayed by Tom Hanks in the movie of the same name) is a perfect example of this. The Conscience Idiot can, just like a child, shame those around them into right action simply by refusing to accept (or understand) the moral grey areas in which we, perhaps, hide our less worthy actions.
6. The Idiot as Plot Operator In this role, writers (often bad ones) use the Idiot to move the plot along. If you have written yourself into a corner and the only way the plot can continue is if one of your characters does something extremely stupid, well, guess who that will be? Not a terribly noble use of The Idiot, but it beats the alternative, otherwise stupid characters doing stupid things for no reason that makes a lick of sense.

In all these roles, the Comedy Idiot is also fulfilling the basic role of any comedic character, and that is to be a source for the unexpected. Indeed, part of why the Comedy Idiot is such a solid bedrock of all functioning comedy series is that there is no basic character type with so many angles from which to insert something completely unexpected into the dialogue precisely because their point of view is very unusual, but because it is nevertheless comprehensible (as opposed to someone who simply spoke nonsense), it can operate at the lightning fast speed of comedy.

Those, then, are my recent observations about the role of The Idiot in comedy. It is a rich and complex subject, however, so this article might well be updated and expanded in the future.

Stay tuned to this channel, comedy fans!