This week’s notes:
There it is again– a man wearing a dark pants and a matching jacket and a light shirt with a dark cloth tied tightly around his neck. A man in a suit. What is a suit? Why do powerful men all around the world wear one? Why, for heaven’s sake, do Japanese businessmen wear suits? Why did Malcolm X?
There has been a bit of noise this week about the IBM computer that supposedly defeated some of the top human Jeopardy Contestants. I have rarely heard such unmitigated bullshit in the past few years.
Consider this:
The computer was allowed to store the IMDB and several encyclopedias including Wiki on it’s hard drives. The human was not even allowed to use Google.
The computer did not express the slightest desire to play the game or win. The IBM programmers did. They cheated by having the IMDB and Wiki with them when they played while the human contestants, of course, did not even have a dictionary.
Some of the observers were dazzled that the computer was able to understand a rhyming word– what animal living in a mountainous region rhymes with “Obama”. They were surprised that the computer had been programmed to “know” that llama rhymes with Obama? You are indeed easily impressed.