Can Technology Make Guns Behave?

We all know the big ones - Columbine, Virginia Tech, and the Dark Knight Massacre, but every year especially in the U.S. it seems people fly off the handle and aren't content to just off themselves.  With each one, comes a flurry of discussion about gun control followed by the NRA backlash and finally the inevitable acceptance of action impotence.  However, with four major shootings in just the last month, I think it's worth a bit more of a palaver.

Imagine for a moment a world in which you could halt mass shootings without impinging on anyone's right to bear arms.  Imagine that you could program a gun to not fire under any circumstances you desire.  Could we as a society agree upon anything if this were possible?  There has already been talk of "smart guns" that only fire for their rightful owner.  This would certainly reduce accidental shootings and thus gun owner liability, but this certainly does not solve the mass shooter scenario to say nothing of creating a potential false sense of security, resulting in storage carelessness.

Now imagine a gun that doesn't fire on innocent people.  Is this possible?  How would innocent be defined?  In order for it to be engineered it has to be defined.  I can't completely answer that, but how about we start with one first small step - No gun shall ever fire on a child.  So what's a child?  Let's say 12 and under.  What if the child is threatening you or someone with a gun?  Okay, any child with a loaded gun does not qualify.  But I'm not even completely comfortable with this.  I can't imagine a child of 3 or under knowingly threatening and endangering another in such a way that required deadly force.  So how about this rule:  No gun shall ever fire on a child of 12 years or younger, unless that child possesses a loaded gun, unless that child is 3 or under.

So how do we implement this?  Imagine guns with facial recognition capabilities as well as the ability to broadcast their loaded status while in motion.  With facial recognition, the gun software could quickly create a facial features fingerprint, go to a database to find a match and then return an age all in the blink of an eye.  Since some guns are stored loaded, it's not practical to require a power source to advertise its loaded status.  However, once the gun is in motion (micro gyroscopes), the kinetic energy of that motion could effectively ping its effective capacity status to some reasonable distance (100 feet?).  There are problems with this, but it is a glimpse of the possible, and as technology improves more solutions are found.  For example, how is it that humans can recognize a child without knowing their exact age?  Once machines can recognize patterns as efficiently as people, there may not be a need for cached databases and online connectivity.  There may also be a way to expand the definition of innocent to that beyond children.  All this can be done without infringing on people's rights to own a gun.  After all, the constitution says nothing of the capabilities of arms, and if fully automatic weapons can be restricted, so can dumb firearms.

Until this technology becomes a reality we have to live with wackos and guns.  So in the meantime, let's send a message to these crazies.  If you're having any inclinations to take out innocent people in some twisted fantasy that gets you off every time your thoughts turn dark, do the world a favor and suck on the business end of your favorite glock right now.  Yes, right now.

Don't beat yourself up for being an almost lottery winner. There's no such thing.

I was reading through an article with recommendations on how office lottery pools can fairly play the lottery as a group.  There were some good points, but two in particular that got me thinking.  This led me to conclude that two of the points taken together are fallacious.  In a nutshell, one says "let the computer pick the numbers" and the other says "play every week so you don't miss the week that hits".  However, the truth is, if the computer picks the numbers on a week you didn't play, it would not have picked those same numbers if you had played.

Quick Pick lottery numbers (I use the Powerball term to cover all computer generated tickets) are generated at each terminal by a random number algorithm probably seeded by something unpredictable like atmospheric or electrical noise.  Many people have the misconception that if a lottery winner comes from a store in their neighborhood, they were much closer to winning than someone on the other side of the country because if they had been next in line instead of THAT person, they would have won.  Not true.  If we assume that your being there has no impact on the seeding mechanism of Quick Pick, the time factor alone is mind numbing.  There are limitless ways to interact with the checkout clerk to ask for a lottery ticket and if the button that generates that ticket were not pressed at the exact millisecond as before, you may as well have been a million miles away from that store.  Maybe the clerk pauses because you remind him/her of someone, or maybe you preface your request with "Um", or maybe the other winner had asked for tickets three times to be understood because of their accent.  Regardless, different numbers will be generated.

So let's assume that your lucky office pool buys some tickets and wins without your participation.  If you called in sick that day, your team merely thinking about your absence changed their behavior enough to generate the winning circumstances.  Said another way, if someone wins from playing Quick Pick, it's because everyone and everything behaved exactly as it did and the game was played at that exact location at that exact second.  This sounds like science fiction, but it is not.  This indeterminate randomness is absolutely necessary; otherwise, someone would have cracked the lottery by now.

This knowledge may not allay the jealousy you feel from seeing your coworker's new found wealth, but it can at least spare you the misery of continuously reliving the "what if" scenarios in your head.  About the only thing you can say with near certainty in this case is "Damn!  If only I had played the lottery with my team that day!  Then they would not have won and I would not have the misery of closely knowing the jackpot winners and seeing firsthand how much fun they get to have!"

sources:  http://www.molottery.com/powerball/understanding_chances.jsp

              http://www.ehow.com/how_2073998_enter-lottery-coworkers.html