To: all-ai Subject: GSB 5:30PM 7AI Friday Nov 4 --text follows this line-- Hi, I'm Neon, The Intelligent Room. Just kidding. It's only me, Carl. I live next to Neon and we chat occasionally, but that's about as far as it goes. Anyway, there's no GSB message as such today, so we might as well take care of some bookwork. First of all, the new graduate students. Every week we wait for them, and every week they don't come. Godot-like, really. Joanna has a theory: Perhaps you're all underage. That makes sense, a lot of us were under 21 when we first came to the lab. But that doesn't mean you can't come anyway. First of all, there are NA drinks. So you can look just as cool as someone downing a Negro Modelo and not smell as bad. Secondly, in this lab we use a not-so-linear age metric. I mean, it'd be a bit silly for those of us in AI to view time since birth as a good measure of maturity. Take Neon and Cog for example; we'll let them drink hard cider before 2013. Also, investment. We've had GSBs pretty regularly for the last two years. That leaves us with money in the bank that we can spend on anything we like. As the CFO of the Benefit, I've made a short list of organizations and causes we might want to donate to. I'd like to hear of other suggestions people have. For instance, the Media Lab. Apparently they've got a new journal called "Wired" that promotes the use of national computing resources to benefit the young generation and others who have slipped through the fingers of today's book and theatre-based society. While I haven't had a chance to investigate this fully, it seems to me that funding "Wired" is one way we can ensure that our culture retains its standards of art and literacy in the coming information age. That's all. This week's Girl Scout Benefit will be held as usual on Friday in the 7th floor playroom, open for prince and proletariat, come one come all sometime between 4:30 and 9:00. Carl