Irrelevant thought:- I work for a Swedish company, and one of the first things you learn is that 'Tack' means 'Thanks'. I also model blu tack - it's an anti-stress thing, I do it whilst I am on highly important (but inevitably long and tedious) teleconference meetings (though it did take me over 10 of these to complete my 3inch high scale model of a Darlek).

Anyway. Back to the irrelevant thought.

Do all people in Sweden think 'Blu Tack' actually reads 'Blu thanks'. Would you buy a product called 'Blu thanks'?

 

Bizarre thought for the day:- Wouldn't it be good if we could program fruit flies for warfare (prompted by a fruitfly breezing past someone's head as they were talking to me in my office).

I said 'Yes, if nothing else it would just drive all the enemy gunmen crazy swatting the little bastards away'. We mused for a while on how all that logic can be fitted into so small a frame and I mentioned an experiment we did at school with woodlice. Woodlice are programmed with a very simple logic - if it becomes light, move randomly until it becomes dark. If you have an area of a box that is dark, then lift the lid and move it to another place over the box, the woodlice will start moving randomly until they find the dark bit, and then stop moving again. Simple 'build your own robot' kits also have this logic, and flies do pretty much the same thing only driven by chemicals i.e. 'if you don't smell fruit, continue flying randomly until you do smell fruit - then fly randomly until the smell gets stronger, until you find fruit'. Thus…actually flies aren't as complicated as all that, though it has to be said that yes, they are still a heck of a lot smaller than their robot counterparts and plankton - which have the same light/dark logic as woodlice - are even smaller again.

I exlained all that, and then I said, well even if you can't program them, how about fitting them with a remote control, but then that led to the problem that if you were unleashing an army of 10,000 fruit flies on the enemy, then you would need 10,000 people sitting their with little Ninento gamepads crazily pressing buttons to control their fly. Unless of course you could rig a few flies up and control them with the same gamepad - I guess you could just do that by wiring them to the same frequency then lining them all up in a row so they set off together (though variations in wind speed plus accidental collisions would knock them out of kilter eventually. Or of course you could have the lot controlled by a complex computer program - wonder which military organisation would sponsor the development of that one.

Personally, I think this whole 'Fruit Fly Army of Death' thing has potential. I reckon Daddy-longlegses would be even more effective because a lot more people seem to be scared of them. Gluing antenae onto 10,000 daddy longlegses is going to be a real pain in the ass though…

I'm surprised myself by how long I spent playing with this...

George Bush Rag Doll