I actually took an artificial intelligence class from Kristian Hammond in my senior year of college, and so I'm definitely going to join in his defense when it comes to the stimulus grant to study "machine-generated humor."

One of the most interesting things I learned from Hammond -- who dabbled with Second City back then, so his claims of not being a funny guy ring a bit hollow -- was how artificial intelligence struggles mightily with double meanings. The example he used was "the old man's glasses were filled with Sherry." Not sure why I still remember that. The point is that humor relies pretty heavily on these sorts of constructions, so there's a lot of depth there to plumb.

For Republicans calling out the program as wasteful, I do feel I should point out that if any of these computer algorithms ever become sentient and hell-bent on world domination, they may come after the folks who tried smothering them in the cradle first.

Rachel Maddow wants Republicans to stop simultaneously criticizing policies they're taking full advantage of. Steve Benen wants George Will to start pointing out flaws in candidates he's backing.

As much as I get the need for righteous indignation on both sides as raw fuel for the pundit-industrial complex, I still don't understand who Maddow and Benen are appealing to. Do they really think that an advocate in the left-wing bubble is going to be able to successfully shame someone in the right-wing bubble into changing their behavior? As for the wringing of hands over why they would do such a thing, or why they're not embarrassed, it's really not rocket science.

Very few people pay attention to any of this. Every politician who says one thing and does another knows this. That your average run-of-the-mill constituent even recognizes that the guy with the big stimulus check for his district is the same guy demonizing the stimulus as the road to socialism is very, very unlikely.

So "public" shaming to a homogeneous audience already on your side seems like a remarkably bad way to pretend to do something about the problem. I'm not sure what the solution is, given the entrenchment of partisan media outlets across the board, but that doesn't seem to be it.

Although, I guess that the more the political junkies are up to speed on this, the more likely it is that somebody might make an incisive and decisive campaign ad that seeks to expose hypocrisy from one's opponent. And -- at least on the left -- it may hope to narrow the enthusiasm gap. It just seems a bit too willfully oblivious to me. Or maybe I'm just that jaded.

In which I speak directly to an audience that may not actually exist.

The good news -- or bad news, depending on your point of view -- is that I still have opinions about lots of things. The bad news -- or good news, depending on your point of view -- is that there are a variety of obstacles to documenting those opinions in this space as I have in the past.

The first, and most obvious, is time. I've been back at the full-time grind for almost six months, and have not really ramped down much of my extracurricular activity since that's happened. It's been tough to keep up on things, let alone write about them. In particular, I don't like just mouthing off about small pieces of bigger stories, so finding the time to properly marinate an idea can be difficult.

The second problem is mostly structural. I'll be on any of three computers and a smartphone at various points during the day, and haven't quite figured out the best way to parlay that into a system where I can do things like tag multiple stories about a particular topic and then bring them together into a blog post.

There's also the not insignificant matter of my Movable Type installation being horrendously out of date -- I sort of feel like I did around ten years ago when I had a hand-coded site that I new wasn't sustainable, and was hedging my bets until I had a better back end in place. Unfortunately, that's something I know I can't tackle on my own, so it's going to take outside help, and the prime candidate is currently busy with his own site.

This isn't any kind of "woe is my, my shit doesn't work right" thing as much as it's me laying out the situation so I can better wrap my head around it. To be honest, my productivity "systems" have been out of whack ever since we moved off of Exchange for Lotus Notes at my last job. I've been getting tantalizingly close to getting a better handle on all my inbound streams of information, and I'm ever hopeful that I'll make the transition from marking a bunch of things for "followup" to actually following up on them.

In case you were wondering.