A town that was a haven for American draft dodgers thirty-plus years ago has created a monument depicting a Canadian welcoming two scared American men.
Unfortunately, I believe the vote count to be much closer than my friend Stephen does. My predictions:
Bush electoral votes: 270
Kerry electoral votes: 268
Switching to Red: Hawaii, Iowa, New Mexico
Switching to Blue: New Hampshire, Ohio
Popular vote: Bush 50.1, Kerry 48.5
Senate: GOP picks up 2.
House: GOP nets 5.
Should Colorado split its vote, Lt. Kerry reports for duty (with Bush still winning the popular vote). I suppose the only consolation for such a circumstance would be the deafening silence on the topic of reforming the electoral college.
Like many people who have been studying artificial intelligence, I was interested to try out the new OpenAI-based ChatGPT interface. Early reports suggest it is good at telling stories, and perhaps plays a little fast and loose with facts. The promise of a general AI bot is captivating. The power of the entire Internet to provide information, natural language processing to figure out what you're looking for and how to respond in a way that's useful, and of course the ability for computers to do what they were originally designed to do: compute. It will make suggestions based on thousands of calculations, all in a few seconds. What if its calculations are wrong? I ran a test today that I expected ChatGPT to ace. It was simple: how much money can you get in a standard briefcase? I knew it would have to do some searching to find the dimensions of bills, the dimensions of briefcases, and do a little math. This could be extended to see how much money could fit in a swimming pool, e...
"Incredible" is the only word that came to mind after reading John Lumpkin's summary of the new Iraq Survey Group report. I got wind of what was actually in the report last night, and was curious as to the spin.
The headline tells it all: "U.S. Report: Iraq didn't have WMDs".
The story goes on in detail about the lack of WMDs, but skirts or avoids altogether the other issues contained in the report.
The group's finding that Iraq had plans to restart its WMD program as soon as sanctions is lifted was covered (or obscured) this way, in the 15th and 16th paragraphs:
Saddam's intentions to restart his weapons programs were never formalized.
"The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions," the summary says. "Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policymakers or planners separate from Saddam. Instead his lieutenants understood WMD revival was his goal from their long ...
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