One Thing About the News

RoboBees will likely inflame the GMO crowd into a wild ecstasy of Luddism ... but ... there's considerably more lucidity in the RoboBees than the GMO crowd will ever know.

(Ed:  why honk the GMO crowd?)

Because they cling to fundamentalist science with the same enthusiasm fundamentalist Christians burn witches.  Hardly any of them got their science in school but rather it was handed out by such noted authorities as Alex Jones, etc.


The specific problem to solve is we need bees to pollinate plants or we starve to death.  That's not hyperbole but rather it's the fact of Nature's food chain.

Here's the abstract from one of the scientists working on the project at M.I.T.




As we watch the sci-fi guys, in this case a woman, and we're diggin' it seeing such a nerdy female, we wonder if they will create a bigger problem than they are trying to solve.

We tried to locate Elizabeth Farrell, the PhD doctoral student in the video, but had no luck.  Nevertheless, we're proud of her in how she waves her freaky geek flag high.  You go, girl.  She doesn't go off yakking about rights ... she makes them herself.


We're maybe a bit removed from the ability to make intelligent robotic flying insects ourselves and confess we have also had little interest but it's a novel approach to a demanding problem (i.e. death of bees due to Colony Collapse Disorder) and the world needs novel sooooo much more than it needs Ward Bond.  He was great at leading wagon trains to the Promised Land (i.e. the American West) but we don't believe he has anything useful to add to the modern world.

Note:  we love Ward Bond and Robert Horton (stars of "Wagon Train," a television series in the sixties for medium-size kids ... who loved it ... just like Hopalong Cassidy).  We are quite sure they have politics too ... but we don't want to fookin' hear them.  In a modern sense, they were emblematic of Manifest Destiny and the reason the Indians got wasted.  We don't want to hear anything of their politics, we were just kids and we liked them.


"Real Genius" is a movie starring Val Kilmer as a brilliant physics student and he's way, way cooler than the Iceman in "Top Gun."  If you want a physics student who can figure out how to fill your house with popcorn and blow it up with laser-carrying aircraft his devious and corrupt professor has tricked him into helping design ... yah, if you want that then Val Kilmer is yer huckleberry and "Real Genius" is where you can see him do it.


Frankly, we have no idea if RoboBees can save the world but we're damn glad at least this team is working on it and in the face of rampaging ostrichism in so many (i.e. don't fix a problem, instead go online and bitch about it).

We do like the idea as, regardless of the robotics, real bees will have their lunch but an intermediate solution until someone finally determines what causes Colony Collapse Disorder and this solution is a fascinating approach to it.


Here at the Rockhouse, we don't believe bees can be wiped out ... because Nature is tougher than our ability to destroy her.  We, however, are not and Nature will dump us before it dumps the bees.  Assuming some colossal disaster for bees, there will still be some surviving somewhere.  Meanwhile, humans starve but bees don't eat humans anyway so these survivors will wait, wherever they are.

After humans have been gone for some time, Nature will begin recovering in whatever way it likes and, along with it, will come the bees again.  We, however, will not due to our deceased nature and they will study us much as we now study dinosaurs.