HELEN GREINER, COFOUNDER, IROBOT

Leafing through my US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT
(Dec. 19, 2005), I come across this beautiful, clear-eyed young woman's face on page 34. A beautiful face, but on a closer look, her face is more than emptily beautiful, not just an empty fill-in-your-own-fantasy model's face; it's radiant with intelligence. Reading more, I discover this woman is truly intelligent, savvy, an inventor. Lately, reading so much from Dawkins's THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, I've been steeped in DNA, genes, evolution, so I look for info of this woman's DNA and I find it a few pages on:

"Born in London, Greiner grew up on New York's Long Island with her mother, a math and science teacher, and her father, a chemistry major turned businessman.

Mathematically and mechanically inclined, she played daily chess with her father starting at age 5 and was programming a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer when she was a preteen. Before long, she was doing her own repairs to her Volvo station wagon with parts she bought at the junkyard. (For "fun," she recently wired her own house for cable and installed a wireless network.)"

Lotsa good genes in there. I imagine she's just one more of those "elites" the Bush machine loves to put down. Anyone with the smarts of a snail is an elite to those fools so this woman must seem an Olympian goddess to them. In fact, if conservatives like Bush would just realize that most of what they have is the results of good genes, at least adequate genes, they might adopt gratitude as part of their natures rather than their continual blaming of the poor for their defects while tangentally praises their own right stuff.


SPEAKING OF ROBOTS AND IQ

So this man goes into a bar and orders a drink. The bar has a robot bartender. The robot serves him a perfectly prepared cocktail, and then asks him, "What's your IQ?"

The man replies "150" and the robot proceeds to make conversation about global warming factors, quantum physics and spirituality, bio mimicry, environmental interconnectedness, string theory, nanotechnology, and sexual proclivities.

The customer is very impressed and thinks, "This is really cool." He decides to test the robot. He walks out of the bar, turns around, and comes back in for another drink. Again, the robot serves him the perfectly prepared drink and asks him, "What's your IQ?"

The man responds, "About a 100."

Immediately the robot starts talking, but this time, about football, NASCAR, baseball, supermodels, favorite fast foods, and guns.

Impressed now, the man leaves the bar and decides to give the robot one more test. He heads out and returns, the robot serves him and asks, "What's your IQ?"

The man replies, "Er ahh, 50, I think."

And the robot says... very slowly, "Sooooooo. . . ya gonna vote for Bush again?"

[I got this off the internet, passed on to me by a friend.]