Foot: Little Brother and Interesting Article

While I'm enjoying the book, I'm quite overwhelmed with the technology and how Marcus is doing everything. I get caught up on what he is doing and the process in which he's doing it that sometimes after a page I just sit there and wonder. Maybe Doctorow doesn't need to go into such detail about the process of how Marcus switches the Fast Track, posts on the XNet, or makes keys for it. He says, "First, you encrypt it with your private key. You could just send that message along, and it would work pretty well, since they would know when the message arrived that it came from you. How? Because if they can decrypt it with your public key, it can only have been encrypted with your private key" (Doctorow 151). To some that might make perfect sense, but although I can kind have understand it, I get lost at the end. I'm not a very technological person and all of this "techy" talk confuses me. Perhaps if I understood what he was doing then I would enjoy it more. It just so happens that my own computer started acting a little weird after reading this book. What a coincidence because I started to freak out and each time I read a little more of the book, I would dream about something like it happening in my real life. Although, I'm pretty sure I would never get away with getting kidnapped and my parents never finding out. Where is Darryl and why isn't everyone looking for him? If I was his friend and knew the actual situation, I wouldn't lie but would tell the truth so maybe there would be a chance of finding him. Again, this is a fiction book and I guess that's why those situations pan out the way they do.

Recently, while watching the playoff games I kept seeing the same commercial over and over. I was getting rather annoyed because I pretty much could say half of the lines with the man narrating and didn't know exactly what they were talking about. Instead of looking up what this new Watson thing was, I ignored it and hoped for the commercial never to come back on. Searching through some websites yesterday, I stumbled upon an article on Watson (find January 20). This time I decided I would read what it said. Watson is actually a computer on Jeopardy that answers questions. It uses vagaries of languages to come up with the correct answer. Vagaries of languages is how the question is interpreted in a multitude of ways. The computer then has to decide which way seems to be the best and posts its answer. It seems like a rather lengthy process, but it does it in a few seconds. I was surprised to see that it answered the first few questions correctly in a matter of mere seconds. You can even watch the computer think and based upon if it is confident enough, you will see either orange or blue circles connecting on its screen.