Gaaa! No G at the Scrabble Table

G is for gi-normous, which is how big the kerfuffle was when the letter G went missing during the World Scrabble Championships recently.

It was a struggle to get the competitors to calm down after the incident, especially since after a search on and under the playing table didn't reveal the missing tile, a referee asked the players to empty their pockets! 

Scrabble is usually such a serene game, filled with periods of contemplation and reflection, permutation and calculation. Arguments tend to center on whether collections of letters are actually words and not just some sort of Dr. Seuss concoction. But when one or both players are accused of going so far beyond the bounds of decency, things can get quite heated. 

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. No punches were thrown, no fisticuffs were threatened, not a drop of blood was spilled.

The incident definitely had an international flavor. One of the players in question was from the United Kingdom; the other player in question was from Thailand. The championships are being played in Poland — Warsaw, to be precise. Surely, no one wanted an international incident.

A larger fracas was avoided when the referee placed another G on the board.

No Reason to Fear the Future: None

I'm not the paranoid type, despite what I know you're thinking about me right now. So it stands to reason that I'm not at all worried about this little news gem: A not entirely known-about government agency calling itself IARPA is looking for a few good men and women to embody the organization's slogan "Be the Future."

IARPA, for those who really want to know such things so they can sleep at night, stands for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. That mouthful is helpful shortened to the acronym IARPA to remind us all that it is affiliated with DARPA, the outgrowth of the U.S. Defense Department that brings us so much more than that annual competition of highly intelligent vehicles.

IARPA is hiring. And you have to really hand it to a company that can get every letter of its acronym in its logo.

So IARPA offers few readily understandable details on its website, but it certainly knows what it wants: to be the future. One of the other wants is another mouthful shortened to a helpful acronym: the Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) Program. Now, even though that program title brings to mind the Future Planning Committee from In the Loop, the FUSE program is still worth worrying about because it is hugely ambitious … ambition is nothing less than a giant "data eye in the sky", the product of a million bits of information collated from traffic webcams, Google and Bing queries, targets and reports from financial markets, and random snippets of conversations recorded surreptitiously in public places during a number of weeks. I guess if you put all that together, you can build any sort of information transportation device you like and hover it in the cloud, as it were. And IARPA are doing this because they want to be ready to fight the enemies of the future, whoever (and whenever) they might be.

I'm actually shuddering as I review that previous paragraph, so let's just move on, shall we, to the Great Horned Owl Program. Now, this one sounds much better as the full name, actually, because the acronym is GHO, and the pronunciation of that one, if done properly, just doesn't bear thinking about. But the goal of this Great Horned Owl Program is to produce a silent drone. I would have thought that drones were relatively silent, given that they don't contain noisy things like people, but there you go, that's what I get for thinking out loud again, and I wouldn't want to do too much of that because I'd be overheard and my words would become part of FUSE. See, IARPA has identified as the key problem with drones the fact that they make a noise as they're approaching targets, which is probably because they contain a payload of weaponry encased in machinery and the combination of the two, when combined with the laws of physics, have no choice but to produce a sound. But hey, why let facts get in the way of a good story, as Mark Twain is purported to have argued.

So, IARPA is looking for people to reprogram the cloud so it has everything everyone ever said or heard in it and keeps on building in the communications of the huddled masses and they're looking to change the laws of physics so that airborne carriers of metallicized destruction emit no sound no matter how heavy their carnage-inducing payload. The thought of both of those projects together has me reaching for the light switch so I can sit in the dark for awhile and shiver, but that's not even the half of it.

See, IARPA are looking to go Back to the Future by actually creating that device that showed Princess Leia in Star Wars. Yep, George Lucas's prescience is on display again, as the Synthetic Holographic Observation Program is on the cards and looking for funding and labor-producing volunteers, the goal being to create a synthetic holographic 3D display that can be observed and understood by people who aren't wearing a special set of goggles or able to channel The Force. The acronym for the Synthetic Observation Program, SHO, is a bit more fun because we can use it to channel Cuba Gooding Jr.: SHO me the money.

But the fact that IARPA are looking to create this sort of thing suggests to my very worried psyche that they know something that we don't, namely that the Emperor and Darth Vader are out there somewhere and the need for a Princess Leia-type message to be implanted into an R2 unit will be more current and possible than we might have first thought.

Worry is me.

Finish Marathon, Give Birth: Works for Her

You have to give it up for a woman who runs a marathon even though she's 38 weeks pregnant.

The sheer exhaustion that Amber Miller of Westchester, Ill., must have felt as she persevered through the last few miles of the Chicago Marathon puts a shudder down my spine. Her back must have been killing her, especially since she finished in an unusually (for her) slow 6 hours, 25 minutes, 50 seconds.

She took care to eat lots of food and drink lots of fluid along the way, which is good because she would have needed the extra energy after the race — when she went into labor.

Yes, the mother of one felt contractions mere moments after crossing the finish line and ended up at the hospital, enduring contractions for just a few more hours before delivering a healthy baby girl, named June, who weighed in at 7 pounds, 13 ounces.

Now, Amber didn't run the entire 26.2 miles. She had been under doctor's instructions to run only half the way, so she ran a bit, walked a bit, which is why it took her so long to finish. She finished the Wisconsin marathon earlier in the year in a time of 4:23:07. In fact, she was pregnant with June at that time as well, although the baby was only 17 weeks along at that point.

In fact, running pregnant has become something of a habit for Amber, who ran the Indianapolis Marathon two years ago in 4:30:07, while she was 18 weeks pregnant with her son, Caleb.

Distance running definitely runs in the family.