All Posts Tagged With: "questions"
A Game of Twenty Questions with the Constitution
This post was also inspired by Professor Larry Klugman. He picked up a digital “20 Questions” game at Walmart for a few dollars to play around with it. He figured it would contain many commonly picked items, but thought its range would be somewhat limited. Klugman reports that it successfully guessed what he was thinking of well within twenty questions, until he tried “The Constitution.”
This time he beat the machine by lasting more than 20 questions. On the 24th attempt, the machine finally ventured a guess. It didn’t get “Constitution” but the answer was still intriguing.
The item the machine guessed was “a receipt.” Professor Klugman urged me to share this with the blog, noting he thought the answer was surprisingly intellectual. In many ways the Constitution is a receipt for our democracy.
Question for the Carmenites
This blog has become one forum for Ira Carmenites to discuss how much they thought of him. I have had the benefit of taking courses with many extraordinary professors over the years, and in Political Science two stand above the rest. One is Carmen, and the other is a community college professor in Decatur Illinois named Larry Klugman. I’m also lucky that both of these greats correspond with me from time to time. A few days ago Klugman forwarded an email to a group of his friends and asked, “If you heard on the news I was convicted of a crime, what crime would it be.” He was very entertained by the series of answers he received. Maybe Professor Carmen would be too.
So here’s the question:
If you heard on the news tomorrow that Ira Carmen were arrested, what crime would you be most likely to assume he committed?
Have fun with it.
Question for the Agora: How does Shazam work?
You have probably seen the iPhone commercial demonstrating the application called “Shazam.” If not, when you’re listening to a song you like, but you don’t know the name of, you open the application, play more of the song, the program identifies the song, and links you to the iTunes store to buy the song.
With most iPhone applications, it’s pretty easy to understand conceptually how the program works, but this one amazes me. Shazam is the perfect name. It’s like magic.
One buddy of mine is convinced it’s rigged to some international bar trivia league where members identify songs at all hours. How do you think they do it?