Robots Need Grace Too
Within 24 hours of “her” big launch on Twitter and other social messaging platforms, Tay (the AI bot developed by Microsoft researchers*) learned all sorts of things from us humans. Primarily that we are awful.
Monthly Archive: March 2016
Half of Republican Women Say #NeverTrump. Maybe the Other Half Haven’t Seen This Video Yet.
Donald Trump won’t like these polls one bit.
The candidate who is presumably busy suing the U.S. political system has a disastrous showing in a new NBC/WSJ poll. Of the female Republican primary voters who were polled, about half (47 percent) said they could not see themselves supporting Trump. This #NeverTrump attitude had a definite gender gap: Among their male counterparts, 40 percent agreed that they did not imagine themselves voting for Trump.
Women tend to lean Democrat as a voting bloc, but data shows that Trump makes the problem much worse.
The ABCs of the Craziest Election of Our Lives
Brokered convention. More precisely called a contested convention, it’s what happens when no candidate earns a majority of delegates—Donald Trump’s greatest fear and the GOP’s only hope in 2016. We’ll likely be looking at a contested GOP convention in Cleveland this July if no one hits the magic number: 1,237.
5 Things I Learned from Lent This Year
Some follow doctrinal guidelines on fasting and abstaining from meat, but other acts of personal penance are encouraged to help loosen our grip on the world and take stronger hold of our relationship with Christ.
With Lent about to draw to a close, it’s a perfect time to look back at how the fasting season went. No matter how successful we’ve become at following through on our myriad sacrifices, each year affords an opportunity to learn from mistakes and discover how to dive deeper into the Lenten season next year.
Paradox Podcast Episode 23: Political Realities and Virtual Realities (with Evan Siegfried)
This week, Evan Siegfried joins Matthias, Zach, and Jordan as we joyfully lament the state of the world today. Terrible Opinions Zach – I’m getting tired of these articles on pay inequality that refuse...
Trump’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Business Deals
If you can overlook Donald Trump’s bigotry, anger and complete lack of political experience, you can support him based on his business expertise and plans to get the country back on track, right? He’s a fighter who will get us a good deal with China, Mexico and Russia … right?
Not unless bankruptcy, lawsuits and multiple failed companies sound like a good deal to you. Trump can try to pass off Bush Brothers steaks as his own and vow he has never been bankrupt all he wants, but he can’t change the inconvenient facts.
‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’ Wins the Battle (Passing the Bechdel Test) But Loses the War (Being a Great Film)
Like its central character, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” can’t quite figure out what it wants to be when it grows up.
The one and only Tina Fey is lots of fun per usual playing Kim Baker, a 40-something who ditches her deadbeat job writing news copy for people who “look pretty on TV” to cover blood, sweat and explosions in Afghanistan. She’s typically deadpan hilarious, with a uniquely Fey sense of timing, and brings a wry humanity to the role as she acts as a surrogate for the audience. Most of us have never been to Afghanistan or experienced the terror of a war zone; Fey’s Baker hasn’t either, grappling with new dangers and a foreign culture in a relatable way.
Lessons from Living on a Food Stamp Diet
You might have heard of this from the frequent “SNAP Challenge” events in which people try to eat on a food stamp benefit for one week. People tend to argue about what really constitutes a true food stamp benefit, but a widely accepted target is $34 for a week.
I’ve always hated these challenges because they feel like turning the need of millions of Americans into a game, making the needs of the poor nothing more than another opportunity to proclaim our alignment with our preferred social group.
This game typically goes one of two ways …
‘The World Doesn’t End Without Facebook.’ Can Confirm, I Quit.
I killed my Facebook account in February and I feel pretty good.
My data’s completely inaccessible (to me at least, who knows what Zuckerberg can still do with it), since I outlasted Facebook’s two-week “You sure about this?” grace period.
Support Trump to Ensure My Generation Votes Democrat for the Rest of Their Lives
I never thought we would be arguing about whether or not we should support a potential leader who threatens the free press, praises a communist government for killing protesters and says an entire religious group should be banned from our country. I never thought I would be told to fall in line and support someone who questions the citizenship of non-white Americans, inspires white supremacists to endorse him and issue robo-calls to voters on his behalf, and generally fulfills the cartoonish and terrible stereotype that haunts the Republican party: the angry, belligerent, racist old white man yelling on his lawn at the world.