A geeky Christmas afternoon, and the perfect woman.

Originally written on Dec 25, 2008

----------

What does an international grad student in Electrical and Computer Engineering do on a Christmas afternoon in Amherst ? Explore Youtube.com, and waste the precious interweb's bandwidth.
Youtube.com is a hungry data-beast, it consumes and grows on flash videos, much like a caterpillar feeding on plants and insects. It is so huge, that it uses as much traffic as the web had in the year 2000. But not without a good reason - Youtube is democratic, fast, legal for the most part so RIAA can keep it in their pants, and devoid of porn.
Youtube made me feel more democratic. Searching for alternatives to the software tyrant of our days - Microsoft, I quickly navigated to Google labs - where the next generation cutting edge software is featured, all of it free, and some of it open for code inspection. That is where I found this geeky blog:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

This gentleman ordered a pair of bare-bone computer servers, as his Christmas present. The servers are inoperable in their packaged state, and his endeavor is to make them functional by mounting hard drives and more memory. How could I not bookmark this page ? He wrote something about Uncanny Valley, which I was not aware of.
Uncanny Valley is in relation to a paradox : humans disdain technology as it creates more life like products. It is creepy to think of a robot resembling your previous crush, although it will be indeed a marvel of technology. The robot shown here on Youtube can play a Violin, although does not (and I hope not) look like your ex:



I appreciated the hot Japanese actroids , and was thinking of asking one out and buying them some system memory as a gift:



However, the Uncanny Valley syndrome quickly stirred up my senses when I found this:



Much like the Internet-mail-order wives, you can purchase this 'perfect woman' actroid from their website. Although lacking in sophistication than other robots (Asimo), the idea cracked me up - and angered me a little bit later. I hate chauvinism: Male, Female, Hindu, White - anything. And these folks are spearheading a campaign, marketing brilliant technological innovations by catering to the lowest psyche of males. I am waiting for the day when feminist groups can release their version of the perfect man actroid, which will be as distasteful as the perfect woman developed by these loonies.