Random post, just to post something

There's a comic I read periodically called Schlock Mercenary. It's an odd combination of hard sci-fi (like, he explains how a lot of the tech works) with day-to-day in-the-trenches soldiering in a far future mercenary company. Some of his little side notes are hilarious.

In today's strip, there was a robot/AI character named 5er0 (that last is a zero). His note on this:

Some of you may be mentally pronouncing "5er0" as "Sero" or "Zero." That is incorrect. The A.I.'s name is pronounced "Vernon." See, the "5" is converted to the roman numeral "V," and the "0" (zero) is converted to the synonym "none," which is phonetically reduced to "non." This scheme for creating names that are difficult to verbally decode is common with some artificial intelligences. 5er0 has a co-worker named Ga6n, and friends named 10a6er, A50ger0, 1000a100ey, 6100tor, A5050en, 10001100hae50, and 500a6500.

While it may be a lot of things, this particular naming trend is clearly neither a compression nor a disambiguation algorithm, as both 10001100hae50 and his batch-sister 10001100he5050e can attest.

A cheat code to the names he mentions: ( spoilers )

(no subject)

This week, Rob tells the Gemini:

Poet Kay Ryan told the Christian Science Monitor how she cultivates the inspiration to write. She rouses the sense of a "self-imposed emergency," thereby calling forth psychic resources that usually materialize only in response to a crisis. Please note that she doesn't provoke an actual emergency: She doesn't arrange, for instance, to have a loved one get pinned beneath the wheels of a car. Instead, she visualizes hypothetical situations that galvanize her to shift into a dramatically heightened state of awareness. This would be an excellent technique for you to try, Gemini. It's quite possible that simulating an imaginary crunch will prevent a real crunch. So picture yourself rescuing a talking parrot from a burning pet store; envision yourself making a snappy comeback that halts the abusive behavior of an out-of-control authority; imagine a nightmare in which you save the world.