Random Thoughts

Three quick thoughts:
  1. How much more bad news can the St. Louis Post-Dispatch take? Last week, star columnist Bill McLellan accepted a buyout. This morning, star sports columnist Bernie Miklasz announced he was giving two weeks notice (ostensibly to concentrate on his morning radio show, but I'm guessing it was contract time and the newspaper wouldn't cough up a big enough offer to keep him). Then came the news that movie critic Joe Williams died in a one-car crash last night. And the worst news? Consumers found out about all three of those items online, for free.
  2. If you put an armed guard in the lobby of every movie theater, how is that going to stop the nut with a gun inside the theater when he decides to start shooting? While we're at it, why isn't the database that prevents mentally ill people from buying a gun in one state shared with every other state?
  3. You may have seen this recent headline: "Google self-driving car involved in first injury accident." What that headline didn't say was that the Google automation inside the vehicle was not at fault -- it was rear-ended by a human driver in another car. In fact, in the 14 accidents involving Google self-driving cars over the last six years, it was never the car's fault (11 times it was rear-ended, and the other 3 times it was being controlled by a human). I'm guessing that, in the most recent accident, the human driver who rear-ended the Google car was too busy checking text messages on an Android phone.