I did a dog sled ride once; awesome little pups couldn't wait to pull; the acceleration was incredible. They loved it and I loved it.

Can't wait for her to colorize the moon.

Now I feel like I was supremely selfish when I didn't buy a box of their little waxy chocolate donuts and little powdery sugary donuts tonight. I was just thinking of my own fat ass and didn't think at all about their legacy pension and medical benefit obligations. I hope they can some day forgive me.

And here I thought perhaps I could have some camo made so I could blend in on stackoverflow or neatorama or whatever...

That was presumably to avoid paying the "not wearing puffy director's pants" taxes levied by the local mayor.

Oh sure that's neat technology but it probably can't tell you when a pair of trousers would put pressure on your gentleman's region in just the right way to make sure that you're the most ill-tempered primate in town.

In Soviet Russia, idealized scene carves you!

I for one lament the loss of our pneumatic tube overlords.

Cute! I want one!

One two-day session with one giganticly powerful supercomputer seems fair enough reason to straddle the line between "can beat top humans" and "still lose to top humans" is fair enough. The designers weren't _confident_ Watson was going to win -- which would seem necessary to me to justify moving the entry towards checkers.

I never did learn how they fed questions to Watson: did it OCR the screen? Did it speech-to-text Trebek? Did they feed it the raw text over a socket? If the latter, then _definitely_ it doesn't deserve to be moved towards "easy".

Antoine:interestingly enough, eyesight is one of the great levelers of humanity -- our eyes deteriorate so linearly and so reliably that nearly everyone needs glasses by age 40 (though many people prefer to stumble through life half-blind rather than admit that their vision isn't what it was...)

Eddie: once again, excellent writing and fun history. Though now I wonder why women wearing glasses doesn't send the same "nerd" signal that men in glasses send.

Man I love tacos.

Only eight? Poor poor pluto.

"Advanced age" is a pretty cruel reason to ignore someone's works. I know they were trying to avoid the awardee dying before getting the prize, but someone who makes it to 88 shows they can beat the odds...

Shodding a horse takes some time, I wonder just how much time that little trick took.