Three From The News…
Posted by Kirk M on 22 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: The News
So what else is their to do on a relaxing Sunday afternoon but peruse through the news? And what else is there to do but put up a another post about certain stories over the past week that hit a nerve.
To wit…
>>So Bush doesn’t like Vermont?
Well, it seems to me he has good reason to. From our local news station:
Associated Press - July 20, 2007 7:35 AM ET
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush visited his 49th state last month, with a stop in Rhode Island. There’s only one has hasn’t set foot in during his nearly seven years as president — Vermont.
A White House spokesman isn’t making any promises about a presidential visit during Bush’s last 17 months in office, and some see some reasons for that.
Vermont is often rated as the most liberal or among the most liberal states in the country, where Bush’s approval rating is among the lowest of any state.
Garrison Nelson — a University of Vermont political science professor — says there would be no point to a Bush visit, that the president would show up and get booed and yelled at.
Bush has visited 49 states — but not Vermont
So my personal thanks to President Bush for staying away. I really don’t think a visit from him would do anything more than irritate the natives and scare the cows anyway. And scared cows don’t give no milk now do they?
>>And that Ipod and lightning thing… 
“I think the message should be that, in the event that you’re jogging and get caught in a thunderstorm, make sure your iPod is not in contact with your skin and remove the earphones from your ear,” Heffernan said.
I think the message should actually be; Don’t jog in a freakin’ thunderstorm, period! okay?
What do you think?
In the meantime, hope all is well with our rockin’ jogging friend.
>>Checkers code finally cracked?
18 years they’ve been working on this. 18 years! And numerous research scientists.
To solve the game, the team had to sift through an astronomical number of checkers positions and analyze the best way to move the pieces. Almost continuously since 1989, dozens of computers have been working on the problem, constantly updating Chinook’s database with more and more positions.
Canadian scientists crack Checkers code
Okay, I understand that something has to be just for the sake of doing it and who knows? Many of the great discoveries in science and technology have been brought forth strictly by accident and/or from another totally unrelated experiment. So through some funky twist of logic I can actually see the purpose in all this. At the very least there will be some checker fanatics out there who will spend the rest of their lives trying to prove them wrong (no offense to the checker players of the world).
Perhaps sometime in the future there will be an “On This Day In History” article posted somewhere that states that history was made on this day when computer technology took a giant leap ahead due to winning a game of checkers.
Of course this checkers “breakthrough” has graced the pages of Google News for the whole past week of course and that’s a bit much in my estimation.
And that’s the news according to me. 
Ain’t life grand though?
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2 Comments »
on 22 Jul 2007 at 5:13 pm 1.john blankey - domain name information said …
I guess the people in Vermont are happy that they never have to see bush in their home state. Maybe I should move to Vermont. and the cracking the checkers game got my interest too. this guy is a very happy that nobody can beat his computer at checkers. I had to read the whole article. well it’s about time.
on 23 Jul 2007 at 7:59 am 2.KirkM said …
Hi John,
Well come on up then and take a look around. As long as you can stand long cold winters it’s not really that bad up here.
Oh, and I’ll have to remind myself never to play checkers with anything but a human. Even then I lose too much.