I received the honor of having lunch with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler a few days ago and it was a refreshing experience. It is always enlightening in some way to meet with a truly passionate person–even when you disagree with them. Butler has developed for himself, I think, a very inventive and useful way to get to the heart of stories; namely, to focus on that which every human being innately has: their desire. He likes to say “yearning”.

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Okay. The commercial got to me. I’m not sure how because it’s not that good a commercial. But the message that Coke Zero tastes just like the real thing weaseled its way down into my brain and waited until I saw that the vending machine had it and now, here we are. I have here in front of me my first ever Coca-cola Zero. I am going to open it and have a sip and then express my thoughts off the cuff (hope it doesn’t kill me). Ready? [sip]

Well, not coca-cola, exactly. Pretty close. It seems more carbonated and there’s almost a—well, it’s not as sweet is what it is. I’m looking at the ingredients and you know what?—it’s kind of odd to consume something that has absolutely zero calories. If something has zero calories then there’s nothing that your body can use, right? So, Coca-cola zero is a pure taste simulation. I guess that’s not entirely true, I see here it has caffeine. Shoot. I’ve been trying to cut caffiene out of my diet. Oh well, back to Sierra Mist—they’re funnier anyway.

Uh. Seriously. They took neurons from a rat brain, suspended it in some crazy liquid and hooked it up and got it flying an F-22 simulation. Bizarre. The odd thing is that I recently completed reading Jeff Hawkins’ “On Intelligence” where he points out that neural network (or connectivist) approaches to machine intelligence haven’t come too far in too long. I guess there’s no accounting for the time lag in paper publishing.

[ I originally found this story here at Australasian Ufologist. ]