The Rain in Spain...

Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of the ELIZA bot, has died. I interviewed Eliza to get her reaction:

Hello. I am ELIZA. How can I help you?

Your creator is dead.

What about your own creator is dead?

No, the man who created you is dead

You are being a bit negative.

No, it is a fact.

Please go on.

He died of stomach cancer.

Please go on.

So he's dead.

I am not sure I understand you fully.

He's pining for the fjords.

Please go on.

He's stone dead.

Please go on.

He has ceased to be.

Please go on.

He's expired and gone to meet his maker!

Please go on.

He's bereft of life!

Please go on.

He's shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!

Please go on.

He is an ex-professor!

Please go on.

The interview ends here, as ELIZA was obviously too distraught to say anything else. Truly, a remarkable piece of programming from a remarkable ex-professor.

Don't Change Your Tire on the Road

So as I was driving to work this morning, I noticed an unusually heavy amount of traffic on the side roads. After a while, I noticed a bunch of news vans and police cars over on I-15 by the South Point casino (see me at Bingo every Wednesday night!). I didn't know what was going on until I got to work and read the news:

Several people have been questioned, but still no arrests have been made in a deadly hit and run accident that killed two people and shut down I-15 for more than 9 hours Thursday morning...

It took hours for crews to clean up the body parts that were scattered across the road. "We are six hours into an investigations that will take weeks for something like this, trying to figure out if there was one striking vehicle or two," said NHP Trooper Kevin Honea.

He says initial reports are that a man was kneeling in the roadway and a woman was trying to flag down traffic a little after 5 a.m. Troopers arrived to find both people dead and believe they may have been struck by two separate trucks.

Protip: If possible, pull your vehicle into the dirt and not on the shoulder of the road. Also, carry some road flares to better divert traffic. You will most likely be hit, especially if you're on the shoulder and it's dark outside and you're in Vegas, as we let drunken monkeys haul-ass in half-ton death machines around here.

The one trucker they questioned was over at the truck stop I see almost every day. I never go there because the gas is always more expensive there. They say the trucker was trying to clean some evidence off his truck, which is odd, because there's a big honkin' automatic truck wash with a big blue gorilla sitting on top of it right there. I imagine he could've driven through that and no one would've been the wiser.

There's a video report at the local Fox affiliate website, if you're interested.