The excitement in the house this week was that my wife's purse was stolen. Well, actually, she left it behind at a yogurt store and when she came back, it was lying in the parking lot sans money and ID. So, an evening busy phoning credit card companies. And there was a lot of cash in the purse because she'd just started Christmas shopping and she had the Christmas money in transit.

Well, someone pointed out that that particular yogurt shop has a security camera. My wife talked to the store owner (who happened to not know of the theft or the visit by the police) and viewed the tape from the day before.

There, caught on tape wasthe girl and the counter and her friends (who happened to be hanging out in the shop) noticing the purse, picking it up, going through it and otherwise cleaning it out. Can't argue with that. They could deny everything if there was no camera, but, once you see the video, there is not much to deny.

And these are young, local kids who probably took advantage of a situation. But I mentioned the money above because it was enough money to make it a felony. One of the girl's is 18 and might end up doing time. A bad decision leading to a lot of consequences.

Clay Shirky clearly describes the rise of ol' style AI in his article The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview . A quotation:

After 50 years of work, the performance of machines designed to think about the world the way humans do has remained, to put it politely, sub-optimal. The Semantic Web sets out to address this by reversing the problem. Since it's hard to make machines think about the world, the new goal is to describe the world in ways that are easy for machines to think about.

I've done my own searching for a new style of knowledge storage and processing but the solution for artificial intelligence (little "a", little "i") is still illusive. The Semantic Web is an interesting implementation of frame based/ontology AI using the web but it does not bring anything more to the cognition party than any of the previous several decades of AI work.

Meta-data is an interesting addition to the web and having a standard way to navigate the structured meta-data makes new things possible, but computers "thinking" about information on the web is still a ways off.

I saw an early sign of Christmas today -- my first truck carrying a load of cut Christmas trees. Can't be long now.

At the age when we discover that fairies don’t exist, we must become fairies or good genies ourselves, and make the incredible happen.

Ths week's community newspaper came and I purused the "Public Safety" section to see what the miscreants were up to in our neigborhood.

It looks like someone is having too much fun with these police reports. I listed a few from the last weeks but here are some, uneditted and just as they appeared in the newspaper [with a few comments from me added] . I am not making this up.

• A woman reported missing by her husband came home. She was out shopping.
• A man contacted at Westlake Park was not smoking marijuana as origionally reported, just plain ol' ordinary cigarettes.
• A Tri-Met bus driver called police to report the man who helped him fix the fare box using an eight-inch hunting knife as "suspicious". Reports suggested the driver did not consider the man threatening. [Just your normal, everyday citizen helping out. --MB]
• Police took a call from a man claiming he came home to find 10 people camped out in his house. The man retracted his story after taking his medication and realizing he'd imagined the whole thing. [This happens to me all the time. --MB]
• [This is exactly as it appears in the paper. --MB] A Dumpster fire was reported at the Luscher Farm dog park. The Dumpster is provided for the disposal of ... ew, gross.