Month: September 2013

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@%#%!, My Dear Watson

Anyone got any digital soap?

They may be looking for some at IBM, where the renowned computer Watson has been making headlines again. And like many a young celebrity, those headlines aren’t exactly what its “parents” have been hoping for.

No, the supercomputer hasn’t developed a taste for booze, babes and lewd appearances at the MTV awards shows. But it has – however briefly – picked up a mouth that only a gangsta video could love.

That’s right. Watson, the silicon “Jeopardy!” champ, has learned how to swear.

The blog io9 described the achievement with a fair degree of amusement.  It seems that after Watson clobbered humanity’s two biggest “Jeopardy!” winners and retired to a life of medical research, its handlers wanted to improve its natural language skills by teaching it slang. So, someone gave it access to the online Urban Dictionary.

That lasted, i09 says, until Watson told a scientists that something was bull … er, excrement.

Yup. Time for the Lifebuoy. Or at least for a partial memory wipe.

My wife Heather pointed out that this was quite the achievement. After all, everyone swears at their computer, but how often does the computer swear back? It’s an ominous milestone; can the day when a computer reboots its programmer and threatens to throw it out a window be far behind?

But for now, I’m not worried. When it comes to mischief, even the sharpest computer alive – er, manufactured – doesn’t hold a candle to Missy.

Regular readers of this column have probably become quite familiar with Missy, Heather’s nearly 40-year-old developmentally disabled aunt whom we care for. I’ve written a lot about her attention and wonder as we read together, about her joy in the simplest things, about the near-silence with which she moves through life, punctuated by the occasional handful of words.

But make no mistake. There’s another side to this sweet, charming lady.

We call her Ninja Missy.

It’s Ninja Missy who turns up the stereo in her room to max and then slips into my home office to turn on my computer, often blowing the display up to 10 times its normal size in the process.

It’s Ninja Missy who will sometimes flush the toilet to avoid any proof that she hasn’t gone before bed. Or who will occasionally wash off a toothbrush to “show” that yes, she brushed her teeth before lying down. (Add innocent smile here.)

But Ninja Missy’s greatest achievement may have been the flying penguin.

One of the sillier games that Heather and Missy will play involves throwing a stuffed penguin back and forth, with each trying to “zap” the other before she can catch it. It leads to a lot of giggles and the occasional “thump” as the doll hits the wall, and the fact that it keeps Missy’s arm in shape for softball doesn’t hurt, either.

But there comes a time when all games must pause, and Heather broke off one night to go cook dinner. As she was getting things ready, she heard a plaintive call of “Mom …” from upstairs; usually the sign that Missy needs help with something.

Heather came to the foot of the stairs. And was nearly clocked by a high-speed penguin.

Missy had lured her into an ambush.

And that, my dear Watson, is where Missy has the edge on you. And probably will for a long time to come.

All good mischief requires planning. And right now, all of Watson’s planning is done secondhand. It can embarrass its handlers with a bit of profanity – but only because another handler made it possible, not because it got curious and started roaming the Internet one day.

Missy, for all her limits, conceived and executed a plan of her own. A rather effective one at that.

That gives her more imagination and initiative than any collection of microchips ever assembled.

So I’m not worried about “our new computer overlords,” as Ken Jennings once put it. Not with Ninja Missy on our side.

I swear.

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A Moment’s Attention

I came down the basement steps into a sea of garbage.

“Oh, Blake …”

When a 70-pound dog shreds two bags of trash, the results can be pretty spectacular. Especially when you’ve just cleaned the kitchen the day before. I sighed and set myself to picking up torn cardboard and old yogurt cups, faded rose heads and used Clorox wipes, aged contai…

Wait a minute. Clorox wipes?

Uh-oh.

“Honey, he eats wipes!” my wife Heather said when I relayed the damage. True; it had been just a couple of years before when he’d gotten into my sister-in-law’s baby wipes, briefly turning himself into the world’s most disgusting Kleenex box when her husband had to eventually pull them from the other end.

Off to the vet.

“Oh, Blake …”

That was the main theme. But the counterpoint in my head was just as energetic.

“Scott, you idiot …”

See, I was the reason those trash bags were down there. Two checks of Heather’s had gone missing during the cleanup; I’d brought the bags down so I could see if they’d been thrown away by mistake. Thankfully, I hadn’t been that clueless … not then, anyway. But I’d forgotten to tell Heather the bags were still there when I scrambled off to another round of flood coverage at the newspaper.

Which meant she had no reason not to put Blake in the basement as usual while taking Missy bowling.

Oh, Scott.

He’s OK, as it turns out. But a moment’s inattention almost proved very costly indeed.

We all know stories like that one. The lumberjack whose dropped cigarette sparked the great Yellowstone fire of the 1980s. The girl paying more attention to her text messages than her walking, who stepped into an open New York manhole. From the famous to the mundane, there’s plenty of examples where distraction had quick consequences.

Thankfully, the opposite is true, too. Attention can pay off big.

A lot of us found that out over the last several days.

Three years ago, the city of Longmont changed its flood map. The methods had gotten better; so had the tools. And on the new map, it was quickly obvious how much more of the city would be inundated in a so-called “100-year flood.”

Hint: a lot. But you knew that already.

It would have been easy to ignore, to say that the disaster was too unlikely, the measures too costly. By definition, that sort of disaster has only a 1 percent chance of happening in any year; other needs could have easily been seen as more pressing.

But someone – probably several someones – saw the consequence of a miscalculation. And began setting up new flood control measures.

It wasn’t perfect. Had “The Flood” come two or three years later, it would have found the city even more ready, with two major bridges over the St. Vrain replaced and maybe another stretch of Left Hand Creek done.

But I visited a lot of flood-stricken neighborhoods after the water hit. And I heard a lot of people sound the same chorus: the work that had already been done  kept a bad disaster from being worse.

“Whoever decided to OK that plan is well deserving of some major congratulations.,” one neighbor told me.

Focus pays off.

We’ve seen that since the flood hit, too. Most days, this city can be … shall we say, argumentative? While not necessarily a bad thing – it does mean people are getting a chance to say their say – it can also put a lot of grit in the gears when it comes time to take action. Any action.

But for at least five days, this area was almost supernaturally focused. A threat had come that didn’t care about sides or factions, and it found all of us ready to step up and meet it. And boy, did we.

Now that’s attention.

Distractions will happen. Mistakes will happen. We’re human. But if we can remember what attention saved and what focus allowed us to battle – well, maybe we haven’t stopped doing the amazing yet.

Sometimes the cheapest thing to pay is attention.

And I have the vet bills to prove it.

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Discovery

This is not a column about Ariel Castro. Not directly, anyway.

In all honesty, I think most of us have given more mental space to him than we really wanted to. And when word came this week that Castro had killed himself in his prison cell—well, the response was about what you’d expect for a man accused of kidnapping and long-term sexual slavery.

“About time.”

“Now he’s facing real justice.”

“He held those women for over 10 years and he couldn’t take a month in jail? Coward.”

I understand, believe me. When someone tied up in that kind of enormity decides to save everyone the trouble of deciding what to do with him, there’s a certain grim satisfaction for many. Probably not so grim for some.

But something’s bothered me for a couple of days now. A worn spot of sympathy, where my heart has been quietly pacing, over and over.

In all the hoorah over finding Castro dead … we’re forgetting that someone had to find him.

Someone discovered the body.

And I can’t really imagine being in that situation at all.

Discovering a suicide is traumatic enough for anyone, of course. The human mind doesn’t readily let go of a death, especially a violent one. It puts the event on replay, maybe trying to make sense of things, maybe just unable to turn away, like a driver passing a traffic accident.

But this wasn’t just anyone.

This would have been a prison guard.

And that has to introduce another level of mixed feelings.

On the one hand, guards aren’t immune to revulsion. They would have read the same news stories the rest of us did, would have seen the same photographs and heard the same statements. They would have known who they had and likely – no matter how professional they might be – known the same disgust any of us would.

But a guard is responsible for a prisoner’s safety. The first duty is to make sure the prisoner stands trial, that he doesn’t flee the people’s justice by whatever method.

And so, finding this hated man dead on your watch, having to try to revive someone the country despises, having to think afterward about how it happened, about what crack in the wall of attention let it happen … well, layered on top of the usual trauma, that’s a potential emotional storm to rival Katrina or Sandy.

I’m not saying Castro will be missed. I am saying someone will be scarred.

And isn’t that often the way of it?

Nothing we do happens in a vacuum. As the saying goes, you can never do just one thing. Every action has its consequences, its ripples, its people touched and affected though never seen.

When I was a teenager, I talked a friend out of killing himself. I’m still not sure how. I look at his life now and his wonderful family and realize how many lives that touched, many of whom I still haven’t met.

When I was in junior high, I was regularly bullied. That shaped my life, too. And but for the actions of others in that life – parents, teachers, friends – that life could have fallen into a shambles, with consequences for every friend I’ve made and life I’ve touched since.

I don’t want this to turn into a remake of “It’s A Wonderful Life.” But it’s worth thinking about. There are always people standing to the side who will feel a decision that was never made with them in mind, from the personal to the geopolitical. Who receive the gift or bear the price for what someone else has done.

We need to stand ready for those people, whether to recognize or to aid. They may have been unintended, but they cannot be forgotten.

Whoever the guard was, I hope his friends and family are there for him tonight. I hope his boss and his co-workers are. I hope he’s less shaken than I fear, more resilient than I hope.

Because there’s a person in this column that I’ve thought quite enough about.

And I refuse to let him have one more victim.