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Another Saturday, another street dance competition.  This was in Chrudim, about 100 kilometers or so east, maybe a bit northeast of Prague.  So, we had to get up pretty early.

The drive down was uneventful enough, it was kind of a cloudy morning, but not  so much that vision was impaired, and traffic was light although I could not understand why three semi-trailer trucks were driving one  after the other with only inches between their bumpers and I  was very happy when we got around them.

We dropped Izzy and her friend off and went on a short tour of the town.  There was a small river and an even smaller stream, and you would  have expected the stream to  run into a river but, it seemed to me (and I  have no idea what happened further downstream, that they ran together until they met and flowed together for a meter or two and then flowed apart again.

Anyway, there were 14 teams and only the top  6 would  advance to the next round.  It seemed to me the level of competition was a bit higher than usual (perhaps because all  of these teams have advanced through a few competitions) so, despite the fact  Isabel’s team danced well, I was not optimistic.

Now, here’s the thing.  We knew that if they advanced, we’d have to stay till  the end, at 8:30.  If they got eliminated, we could get out of there and go home.  So, theoretically, and certainly when talking to Isabel, we had to be hopeful she would  succeed.  But, damn, these competitions are obnoxious and my butt was aching  from the hard, plastic seat.

It was a classic example of mixed emotions.

They did not get through.  Isabel did not seem too upset, though (they were 7th out  of 14) and got invited to spend the rest of the weekend at her friend’s cottage.  So, I did not feel  too  guilty  about my mental  disloyalty, and we got home early.

In the race to develop AI, the emphasis should be on  the I and not on the A.  In fact, any new kind of intelligence would  be  useful, whether it is artificial, newly evolving, or maybe  just  something that’s been right in front of our noses all along.

Of course, in the early days of the internet, everybody thought  that once all the knowledge of the world was online and accessible, we’d have all the problems of the world  solved.  Which is what  an AI could do.
Or we think it could do.

What if we had a machine so  intelligent that when  we posed the question: How can we transform the world into a perfect  place for humans to live, with plenty of fresh water in  all the right places, nice homes, high speed public transportation, clean  energy, nice schools pre-k through grad school all the world around, low hours of work at dead easy jobs and lots of vacation time, excellent health care leading to centuries long life spans, and a bit of space travel?, it would spit  out  the answer, or a range of answers, complete with floor plans, blue prints, construction schedules and a day by day checklist of how we get from now to then.  Would we listen?

I don’t  know, but it would sure beat the hell out of the Turing Test for proof of intelligence.

Of course, the title is lazy thinking.  “Stephen Hawking is right” is the  safe bet in any argument, being as how he’s the smartest man in the world and all.

The question at issue is his  recent statement that the human race needs to find a new  planet within the next hundred years, or the human race will go extinct.  While I would question the 100 year number, there is little doubt that humanity must eventually become an interstellar species or  perish.  That’s mathematically inevitable.  I’d say, it might as well  be within the next hundred years, even if he’s wrong.
Also, there’s  the question of  what he means by ‘find a new planet.’  Actually beginning the migration to  an Earth like world around another sun is not  going to happen at our current level  of technology and we might have a  couple  of centuries to go before we can build a Stanford  Taurus with  a random probability drive capable of housing a significant population, maintaining life support  systems, and making it to another star system before everybody on  board  is  dead.  All  the more  reason to start  now.

What IS within our reach within the next 100 years is a few more space stations, colonies on our own moon, Mars, and maybe Titan and Europa, mining operations going on in  the asteroid belt and, one I  would dearly like to see although the technology to build it doesn’t  actually  exist yet, a space  elevator.

That could be enough.  If a gamma ray  burst or an asteroid hits Earth and kills every living thing on its surface or, at least, anything bigger than a rat, it will be  the colonists of the moon and Mars who will have to carry on and rebuild the  species.

So, a good percentage of those  colonists needs  to be women.  Young women.  Otherwise you’re going to wind up with a couple hundred pissed off and very frustrated male astronauts, waiting to die and knowing the human race dies with them.

So, a woman was arrested for laughing at Jeff Sessions, which is not only an egregious violation of freedom of speech (if she was being disruptive, they could have asked her to leave – it still  would have  been  bad, but not as), but it demands that people do something that is actually difficult to do.  How can anybody not laugh at Jeff Sessions?

He looks (and thinks) a lot like  the Henry Gibson character in The Blues Brothers, wants to escalate the War on Drugs and relegalize discrimination, two positions that might be held by Dr. Doofenschmirz or Boris and Natasha, they are  so comically evil.

Getting arrested for laughing at Jeff Sessions is like getting arrested for sneezing.  There are some things a body just can’t help.

In Czech news, the government has resigned.  It’s a parliamentary system, so  I guess a new coalition will be formed.  Things aren’t going to grind to a halt.  Most people aren’t even talking about it much.  Governments change pretty often  here.  Everybody  goes to  work, just the same.  Nobody’s suggesting taking away our health care or ratcheting up the war on drugs, or anything stupid like that.  It’s not the U.S.

It was bad enough not being aware that his ‘good friend’ Pavarotti has  been dead for 10 years. Hey, people are dying all  the time and if you’re not following the news closely, you can miss stuff like that.

But now everybody’s up in arms at his comments over the Civil War and Andrew Jackson, which indicate that he probably flunked 5th grade history and hasn’t learned anything since then.
I’m going to defend him here, sort of.  Just sort of, of course, because  he really is an unbelievably ignorant man.
Sure, the hero of New  Orleans was  long in his grave by the time the Civil  War began, a fact that  Donald Trump seems to be ignorant of, but tensions between the North and the South were already a thing by the 1830s, when Jackson was president.  In fact, they were already in play at the time of the revolution, which helps to explain why we have the electoral college.  The South has never trusted the North.

Then, there was  the comment, and I paraphrase because I  don’t want to flip screens  again to look it up:  “Why was the  Civil War?  Why couldn’t all that have been avoided?”
In fairness, he’s not the first person to ask that question.  Sure, if we hadn’t had a war, slavery would have continued, probably for decades more, but hundreds of  thousands of people who died would have lived.  So, would  avoiding it have been a good thing?  Hard to say.

But, it could have been avoided.  Slavery was a great evil but there were plenty of people, even in the North, who weren’t too  fussed.  Sure, Lincoln was a Republican, the leader of the anti-slavery party, but  he was hardly the most radical person in that party, and he would have gladly avoided the war.  So, yes, it could have been avoided.  Right up to the point when the South attacked Fort Sumter.

This is the  part that Southerners, who wave the Stars and Bars  and talk about heritage and how Lincoln invaded the South, tend to leave out.  They started the war.  They asked for it.  They insisted  on it.
And the descendants of the racist assholes who started that war are the same people  who support Donald Trump.
So, it’s possible we would have been better off just letting them go in 1861.  But, that really wasn’t an option.  They saw to that.