Author Archives: ElsieGiltner

Ted Cruz’s Daughter Schools Him on Taylor Swift

by ElsieGiltner Posted on April 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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The CNN Town Hall with Ted Cruz and his family on Wednesday night began with host Anderson Cooper talking to the candidate about the usual political subjects, including his thoughts about GOP front-runner Donald Trumps’ vocal opposition to the current system of gathering delegates in advance of the Republican National Convention. Cruz said Trump is acting like a “union boss thug” by threatening delegates and noted that he’s only complaining about the process because recently he has lost several key primaries. “In the last three weeks there have been 11 elections in 4 states. And we have beaten Donald in all of 11 of them,” Cruz said. “He’s unhappy about that.”

When Heidi Cruz joined her husband on stage and audience members came to the mic, the questions moved from the political to the personal: What was their first date? (A dinner when the two were working on the Bush campaign in 2000). What did she think was his “most annoying” quality? (His iPhone). Cruz also told the audience that he loves movies, but his wife isn’t interested in them, and after The Princess Bride, his favorite movies are The Godfather series, including The Godfather Part III.

But the real highlight of the evening came when Cruz’s two young daughters, dressed in identical yellow dresses, were asked who they would first want to invite to visit the White House. Caroline, whose eighth birthday is on Thursday, and five-year-old Catherine, were shy about naming their favorite pop star, but their mother Heidi answered for them: “The girls would love to have their first guest be Taylor Swift,” she said.

The girls may not have had much to say on the Cruz vs. Trump delegate fight, but they weighed in on a different kind of “Bad Blood” (#sorrynotsorry). The whole family exchange was pretty adorable.

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Ted Cruz’s Daughter Schools Him on Taylor Swift

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In the Contest for Worst Automobile-Driving Species, the Winner is Homo Sapiens

by ElsieGiltner Posted on September 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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A reader tells me this story seems right up my alley:

Google, a leader in efforts to create driverless cars, has run into an odd safety conundrum: humans.

Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan.

….Dmitri Dolgov, head of software for Google’s Self-Driving Car Project, said that one thing he had learned from the project was that human drivers needed to be “less idiotic.”

That’s the spirit! And when Skynet takes over, humans will finally cease to be such a nuisance. Driverless car nirvana will be at hand.

Ahem. In reality, of course, this whole story is sort of silly. Of course the biggest problem with driverless cars is humans. What else would it be? Plop a few thousand driverless cars into an empty city and they’d get along swimmingly. No one is unaware of this, least of all Google.

But I suppose from Google’s perspective, stories like this are useful as ways to calm fears about driverless cars. And there is a good point to be made about that: driverless cars don’t have to be perfect to be useful. They just have to be at least as good as humans. So while the fact that humans are generally idiotic drivers might be a short-term annoyance, in the long run it’s a huge bonus for Google. They don’t have to beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, just the local high school JV team.

This, by the way, is why I’m so generally bullish on artificial intelligence. It’s not because I have such a high opinion of computers, but because I have such a low opinion of humans. We really are just overclocked chimpanzees who have convinced ourselves that our weird jumble of largely Pavlovian behaviors—punctuated by regrettably rare dollops of intelligence—is deeply ineffable and therefore resistant to true understanding. Why do we believe this? Primarily for the amusingly oxymoronic reason that we aren’t smart enough to understand our own brains. The silicon crowd should be able to do better before long.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, I’m a lovely driver. It’s all you other folks who are causing so many problems.

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In the Contest for Worst Automobile-Driving Species, the Winner is Homo Sapiens

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