Watson!

Happy Valentine's Day, all!

We had a beautiful warm day, blue skies and 80 degrees. This morning after our walk I continued my work on refinishing the little table. I sanded and rubbed with steel wool to prepare it for a second coat of the polyurethane/stain combo. It was a bit tricky because I realized that there were drips in the first coat that had to be removed. I tried to be very careful in applying the second coat to avoid any runs, but that meant that the coating was going on unevenly, so more application, more brush stroking. Then some nearby cutting work blew some bits of sawdust onto my table top. I tried to remove the larger ones and rebrushed, but tomorrow I'll have to sand again....

This afternoon we danced to Darryl Lipscomb. Steve had a ballgame to umpire, and Judy's kids are still with them, so neither Spauldings nor Pottingers were at the dance. We saw a lot of red and pink today. Ken wore his Escapees tee-shirt, and I wore my red capri pants and a sequined red heart on a white tee--all in the name of getting in the V-Day spirit.

Tonight was the big Jeopardy challenge, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter against Watson, an IBM computer designed to understand natural language--and even the puns and jokes common in Jeopardy clues. We've been waiting for some time for this event. It's a three day tournament. Today we saw only the first Jeopardy round. It's clear that Watson is a very powerful computer, but one with limitations in language processing that give the human players a chance at least. Brad Rutter is tied with Watson. My favorite, Ken Jennings, trails the other two, but tomorrow brings double Jeopardy, so we'll see what happens.

We heard a piece on the radio today ("The Godfather of Nonviolent Resistance?" A radio interview by Robin Young, WBUR) about the Albert Einstein Institution. Founded by retired Harvard researcher Gene Sharp, it is "committed to the defense of freedom, democracy, and the reduction of political violence through the use of nonviolent action." We were so impressed by the work of the institution that we immediately made a contribution. Nonviolence is certainly the morally preferable choice, and it appears that in many situations, it is also the most effective choice for political change. Sharp distributes his book From Dictatorship to Democracy as a free download on the website.