Yes, here it is, yet another Friday the 13th ^[1], a date which has scientifically proven to be, by far, the unluckiest day of the year on which to juggle flaming chainsaws on a tightrope over the Grand Canyon while naked, drunk, and suffering from a severe inner ear infection.

We have plenty of hot, tender, plump when you cook them news stories for you today, including freaky creepy robot footage, tidal energy facts, and a frightening new frontier in reproductive science.

Wow, this must be your lucky day!

Uncanny Valley Days

There are a couple of creepy (but extremely function, I should add) robots hanging around the world these days, just waiting to give you nightmares.

Like take our old pal PETMAN.

As you can see, he does push ups as well as stairs now, all in that horrifying “Terminator in physical therapy” kind of way.

I mean seriously, couldn’t they pretty the thing up a little before taping? Or is that hardcore robot skeleton look part of what gets them the funding these days?

It sort of looks like it cheats on the stairs to me, too. Like it has not so much mastered stairs as learned to make evenly spaced hops. Not the same thing.

Or how about a creepy robot octopus?

Kind of looks like a smoke detector got raped by an order of steamed bean sprouts.

In reality, it is the product of the creatively named Project OCTOPUS, and it uses all kinds of high tech wonderful stuff like memory alloys in order to make those tentacles twitch.

Fascinating in theory, but I am having trouble imagining it working out in the long run. The goal is obviously to make a robot which can manipulate objects in its environment without having to deal with something as complicated as a hand or as limited as a claw. And octopi have proven extremely good at using their tentacles.

But the human hand is complicated for a reason. It is an extremely sophisticated manipulator, far beyond anything we can create artificially. I think getting the robot to be able to do anything useful will prove to be far more complex than people suspect.

But who knows? For simple but tedious jobs like underwater cable or pipeline construction and inspection and/or even simple repairs.

Power from the Ocean

Moving on to alternative energy (which is so much hipper and cooler and edgier than mainstream energy), Pop Sci has recently published this interesting article about how one form of ocean thermal energy might work in the future.

I am fairly interested in this alternate energy prospect. It is true that the initial costs are quite high, but that is true of nearly all forms of public energy. We easily forget this in modern times because we tend to be getting our energy from an infrastructure bought and paid for by both the vision and the funding of many generations ago.

But all those dirty coal fired power generators, as well as the incredible amount of wire and pole that it takes to get it from the power plant to your home, did not come cheap. We have to think in those terms when we think of the energy of the future, and be glad that past generations had the will and the foresight to invest in the future for us.

I particularly love this part of the article :

A 3,200-foot-long, 33-foot wide pipe is not something you could build in a factory, haul out to sea and drop into the water, Meyer explained.

Well DUH. Obviously it would be built slowly and methodically like an underwater pipeline or cable.

Hey, maybe the OCTOPUS could help!

I’ll Take a Dozen Large Caucasian Eggs, Please

Finally, we have our Frightening Science Story of the Week.

In this case, it is the scary truth that we can now manufacture human ova in a lab.

Unsurprisingly, this involves stem cells. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have managed to prod some ovarian stem cells into turning into immature human eggs, and the really freaky part is, later this year, they plan to fertilize them to see if they are viable.

Not exactly the science fiction horror scenario of human eggs being produced on an industrial scale and human reproduction eventually not requiring the involvement of any human beings at all (mass produced ova, sperm, artificial wombs, clone armies… ), but it is still a strange thing to contemplate.

Using stem cells to produce medically needed body tissues is one thing. Nobody seriously has a problem with a future in which we can use stem cells derived from shed skin cells in order to generate a genetically identical new heart or kidney or spine for somebody.

But when you begin to involve human reproduction, things get far less clear. Suppose a corporation legally buys some blastocysts and sperm, then uses them to generate a zygote, then hired a surrogate and implants it in her.

Does the corporation then own te resulting child? They owned all the ingredients that went into it and all the equipment and labour as well. Nobody doubts that if a bakery makes a cake, they own the cake.

Well what about whipping yourself up a whole new person? What kind of rights would said person have?

And what happens when you implant extra eggs in a woman approaching menopause? Women have a finite number of ova, and when the last one goes, that trigger menopause. Would an unlimited supply of implantable ova keep a woman from experiencing menopause, period^[2]?

And if so, what effect would that have on the woman’s health and aging in the long run? What happens if you put an important biological signal on hold like that?

The future is a strange and freaky place, to have such questions in it!

That is all for this week, folks!

[[2]] No pun intended, I swear.

I usually avoid talking about this topic altogether, because being an anti-abortion liberal is not exactly easy and I know the sorts of arguments I will get into if I air my views.

But a recent piece on the Daily Show angered me enough that I feel I have to put my views and the reasoning behind them into words in order to clear my mind and let my emotions settle down again.

The first thing you have to know is that my position is, unequivocally, not a religious one. I can say this with total conviction because I have no religion, and I have never had one. Both my parents are atheists and I was raised entirely without religion.

So no, I am not against abortion because my church, my holy book, my religious leadership, or my God or gods tell me so.

I am against it because my conscience tells me so. It tells me that abortion is murder, or at least, something very close to it.

Now in order to illustrate the reasoning that led me to this conclusion, I am going to paint a somewhat harsh picture, and I apologize for that, but it is the best way to get my point across.

I want you to imagine the waiting room of a busy obstetrician’s office. On every chair sits a pregnant mother. All stages of pregnancy are represented, from the ones for whom the news is quite recent to the ones for whom birth could happen any moment now.

The atmosphere is calm and tranquil. The women smile to one another in mutual understanding. Tips and stories are exchanged, giving the newer mothers valuable insight into what it is like further down the line. They all make frequent trips to the bathroom, and laugh about it with each other.

Into this happy scene comes a young, ambitious abortionist, who addresses the room :

“Hello ladies! Sorry for interrupting, but I just wanted you all to know that if any of you want me to jab a surgical instrument into that inhuman growth in your womb so I can chop up its little arms, legs, heart, and brain and then suck the pieces out with a vacuum, I am just next door. ”

The women, of course, are shocked, horrified, and enraged. How dare he offer to do such a horrible thing to the precious lives growing within them? What kind of a monster would do that to a baby?

But that is just the problem. The only difference between these ladies at the obstetrician’s office and the ones next door at the abortion clinic are that they want their babies, and the ones next door do not. To a happily pregnant woman, there is absolutely no doubt in their minds that what is growing inside them is their baby , even if they have only been pregnant for days. But for the women waiting for an abortion next door, it is a part of their body, a growth, to do with as they please.

So it is a precious baby when the mother wants it, and an inhuman growth when she does not.

And that is absolutely unacceptable.

We would not accept that a child is a human being only if its parents want it, even in the case of a newborn baby still covered in blood from the trip.

So how can we call it a baby when it is still inside its mother if she wants the child, and go along with her naming it, finding out its gender, buying presents for it, and in all senses thinking of it as a precious human being growing inside her, and then turn our backs and pretend it is not murder if another woman at the exact same stage of pregnancy has an abortion?

Either no fetus is a human being, or they are all human beings, whether the mother wants it or not.

And what about premature babies? Were a deranged lunatic to kill all the babies in the premature baby ward with a knife, thee would be no doubt said lunatic was a mass murderer and guilty of infanticide.

So how is it different if an abortionist does the same thing while the child is still inside its mother?

And medical science continues to push back the time when a premature baby can survive outside the womb. Eventually, we will be able to take a baby all the way from conception to “birth” entirely outside of a woman’s body. And what then?

Will we draw an arbitrary line saying “Unplugging before this date is not murder, but after, it is?”

Or will we simply err on the side of humanity and assume that which will become human is human?

Ask a woman who has suffered the profound tragedy of a miscarriage if she feels that she lost her baby.

Ask a woman who has only recently gotten pregnant after many years of trying with her husband whether or not she feels like there is a baby inside her now or not.

Ask all those ladies in the obstetrician’s office “Who here has a baby inside them right now?”

No matter how you examine it, there is simply no way to rationalize the idea that it is fine to think of it as a baby if the mother wants it, and something else if she does not.

Women bear a unique moral burden because they can have another human growing inside them. This burden can be a terrible one in the case of unwanted pregnancies, especially in the case of rape or incest.

But surely the solution is not the murder of the child, the genetically, medically, and scientifically unique human being with its own fate and destiny, within her?

Yes this places a burden on women that is not shared by men, and that is unfair. But surely we cannot slaughter innocents in the name of fairness. What is more important, fairness or human life?

It is not for the mothers to decide whether their children live or die, inside the womb or out.

And that is why I am against abortion.