A Bob's Life: Monday Musings - February 10, 2025

Monday, February 10, 2025

Monday Musings - February 10, 2025

1. Welcome to the second Monday of February. It is also the Monday after the Super Bowl--which wasn't all that super. There are 46 remaining Mondays in the year 2025!

2. Yawn, such was the Super Bowl. Apparently the Chiefs stayed in their hotel for the game. The final score of 40-22 Eagles over the Chiefs, was much closer than the game actually was. For a while, I thought we were preparing for the first shutout in Super Bowl history. I guess I won't be seeing the Chiefs players in so many commercials now. As for the halftime show, I am not the demographic to which the show was designed to please.

Limestone Creek Trail
Jupiter, FL
February 8, 2025

3. While shopping for our Super Bowl party, I ran across the strangest sale. It was buy 2 and get 3 free on 12 packs of Pepsi products! Wow! When it was all done I was able to by Pepsi for pre-pandemic pricing. It worked out to $4.12 per 12-pack. WooHoo! I still can't believe it--but it happened! However, I got gouged for the potato chips.

4. I enjoyed a 19-mile plus bike ride on Saturday. I rode a circuit that I infrequently use. I like it because I have added in a short trail that takes me through a forested area and provides a nice change of pace from riding on the streets. It is a short, but pretty ride and in some ways reminds me of the ride I took with Patrick and Jeremy last summer as we completed the GAP.

4. Save your pennies! Production of the, in my opinion, most useless coin in the world, is about to stop.

5. Today in History. On February 10, 1996, after three hours, world chess champion Garry Kasparov loses the first game of a six-game match against Deep Blue, an IBM computer capable of evaluating 200 million moves per second. Man was ultimately victorious over machine, however, as Kasparov bested Deep Blue in the match with three wins and two ties and took home the $400,000 prize. An estimated 6 million people worldwide followed the action online.

Kasparov had previously defeated Deep Thought, the prototype for Deep Blue developed by IBM researchers in 1989, but he and other chess grandmasters had, on occasion, lost to computers in games that lasted an hour or less. The February 1996 contest was significant in that it represented the first time a human and a computer had duked it out in a regulation, six-game match, in which each player had two hours to make 40 moves, two hours to finish the next 20 moves and then another 60 minutes to wrap up the game.