Hawking a Voice

President Obama was in West Virginia today to eulogize the 29 miners that were killed in the coal mine explosion and burial. Really? Does the President need to take time out of his job and fly himself to West Virginia with his entire Secret Service detail to say a few words at this funeral? Come on, thousands of people die every day in accidents around the country and many of them are while doing things that are relatively safe. Once you become a miner, don’t expect to be killed in an accident one day? What are the odds of you actually completing a career in mining and retiring with a pension from the mining company? About 1 in a 100? It probably cost a small fortune to transport the President there for some guys that were going to be killed in a mining accident eventually anyway. Let’s give it a rest…

Physicist Stephen Hawking announced that it would probably not be good for us to meet higher life forms. He compared what meeting E.T.’s would be like with the American Indians meeting European voyagers during the colonization of America. I’ve got one question for Hawking, what’s up with that voice box that sounds like the robot on Lost in Space? Come on already, I know for a fact that voice generation technology has advanced beyond that level. If you’re actually some big, important scientist, wouldn’t you have upgraded the technology in your computer? Not only could you make the voice sound more life-like, I bet you could probably customize it to sound like anyone you wanted. How about getting one that sounds like James Earl Jones when he is doing the voice for Darth Vader? Or Jack Bauer’s voice from 24? I bet you’d get a little more respect when you start barking out theories in Kiefer Sutherland’s voice. Maybe you could change voices to fit the situation. Maybe if your giving a lecture at Grambling, you could break of a little something ala Snoop Dogg. Or if you teach a class in Japan, you could do the voice of the neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Just an idea, maybe when you take a break from thinking about black holes, you could give it some thought.