Inspirationaemia

How bad is it? I'm lying here, watching TV. A commercial for "Flex Seal Clear" comes on. The pitchman enthuses about Flex Seal's ability to prevent water damage by forming watertight seals around cracks. The dramatic demonstration: the bottom of a rowboat is replaced with a sheet of clear plexiglass. Numerous holes are drilled in the plexiglass, and then the whole things is sprayed with Flex Seal Clear. The next thing we see: The pitchman in the boat, happily bobbing on the waves, the seal holding, fish swimming oblivious below...

...And I'm lying there thinking: Hey, THIS could make a good blog post!

Bowled Over

Prior to the kickoff of this year's Rose Bowl, between the Stanford Cardinal (no 's,' please, we're pretentious) and the Michigan State Spartans, the audience stood and both teams took the field to listen reverently to the National Anthem.  As is customary, hats were removed and held over chests.  The players removed their helmets.  I couldn't help but notice the MSU mascot, Sparty (!); he basically looked like this:

You see?  He DID NOT remove his helmet!  Now, you might excuse this by pointing out that, as a Spartan, Sparty maintains his citizenship in a Greek city-state, and thus owes no allegiance to the United States or its traditions.  But this is just plain rude!  A more acceptable explanation is that the helmet is permanently affixed to the rest of the mascot costume, and thus cannot easily be removed independent of the head.  Of course, then, the appropriate thing to do would simply be to remove the entire head.  Unless. . .  IT'S NOT A COSTUME AT ALL!

My point?  Michigan State University is populated by unknown numbers of heavily muscled, felt-skinned warrior mutants!  I pick them to win by 5 1/2.

And So This Is New Years. . .

As 2013 draws to a close, I find myself in a melancholy mood.  There have been some big changes in my life of late--maybe I'll tell you all about them one day soon.  I can't say the year has turned out badly, but I can say that, one year ago, I wouldn't have expected to be where I am now.  And I can scarce imagine where I'll be one year from now.

I started this blog about five years ago, as a sort of new year's resolution, in fact.  And somehow, over the years, I have acquired 39 followers--which is about 38 more than I ever expected to have.  And to all those who have read anything I've written, I'd just like to say thanks.  Whether you've ever left a comment or not, the thought of people out there--wherever "out there" is--actually caring to take a couple of minutes a day to read my random ramblings has actually kept me doing this.  So you have no one but yourselves to blame!  But you can also congratulate yourselves on helping to facilitate that rarest of feats: the KEPT New Year's Resolution.

It's the Least We Can Do

Going into the 2014 midterm elections, many Democratic Party strategists think a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage will provide a potent source of ammunition in campaigns against Republicans.  The minimum wage, currently $7.25 an hour, was last raised in 2009, and President Obama has proposed that the wage should gradually increase to $10.10 an hour by 2015; in fact, if the minimum wage had simply been indexed to inflation since the late 1960s, then it would currently be just over ten dollars an hour.  Among the electorate, the idea of raising the minimum wage enjoys broad--and bipartisan support.  Many Republican lawmakers, however, claim that raising the federal minimum will hurt small businesses.

For those GOP politicians who resist raising the minimum wage, I have a question: You claim that cutting taxes on the wealthy--supply-side economics--makes fiscal sense.  You claim that the benefits of allowing the wealthy to keep more of their own money will "trickle down" to the general population through, say, greater investment in productive activities--which leads, theoretically, to increased employment and a more vibrant economy overall.  The metaphor frequently invoked to describe this situation is that "a rising tide lifts all boats."

So my question is this: Why does this boat-lifting rising tide come only from putting more money in the hands of those who already have significant fortunes?  Wouldn't putting more cold hard cash in the pockets of those who have less similarly cause some minor flooding along the shores of the American economy? 

The Singularity Approaches!

An article in today's Times explains that, in the next year, "learning" computers will become commercially available.  The cutting-edge software in these computers is modeled on the human nervous system.  By imitating the human brain's ability to develop new neural pathways in response to external stimuli, these computers will effectively "learn" from their mistakes, thus eliminating (or at least greatly reducing) the need for reprogramming.

The breakthrough moment? "Google researchers were able to get a machine-learning algorithm, known as a neural network, to perform an identification task without supervision. The network scanned a database of 10 million images, and in doing so trained itself to recognize cats."

From that point on, computer scientists posed ever-more-challenging identification problems to these learning computers, which demonstrated exponential improvement.  The computer quickly identified
images of George Clooney:

And Gwyneth Paltrow:

The computer had no problem with historical figures, either, as this picture of Benjamin Disraeli proves:

And finally, when tasked with procuring an image of the Grand Canyon, the computer responded in a matter of nanoseconds:

Truly, the future is upon us!