Using Their Noodles in Ireland

You might expect to dance a jig and eat corned beef and cabbage when you travel to Ireland for St. Patrick’s Day, but if your destination is Ireland, W.Va., expect to square dance and eat spaghetti instead. “We don’t try to be authentic Irish,” said Sandy King, president of the Shamrock Extension Club, which sponsors Ireland’s annual, weeklong St. Patrick’s Day and spring festival. For the finale Friday night, residents of the Lewis County town will hike up to their version of the Blarney Stone, a jagged rock at the top of a steep hillside, and lay down two pennies for good luck. The events started with the Greenery Stroll--a parade of horses, bikes and tractors--and an Italian spaghetti dinner. The organizers considered adding an Irish touch to the meal, but decided against it. “We thought about serving green spaghetti, but we didn’t think that would go over very well,” King said.

--A researcher of artificial intelligence hopes he has found the recipe for teaching computers to reason in increasingly human ways. Kristian Hammond of the University of Chicago fed 12 basic recipes into the CHEF computer program and added basic cooking instructions, such as how long it takes an egg to boil and the relative rates at which meat and vegetables cook. The program then applied its cooking knowledge to new dishes, substituted new combinations of ingredients and “invented” 38 recipes, ranging from Chinese stir-fry to French desserts. The strawberry souffle printed out by the CHEF program is very good, but some of the stir-fry dishes need a bit of work, Hammond said. He sees the experiment as a step toward enabling a computer to learn from its mistakes, as people do, but he admits there is still one problem--his CHEF can’t taste the results.

--Wayne Sipe literally dropped in on some friends to celebrate his 80th birthday and to raise money for a charity. The retired roofing contractor from Salem, Ore., marked the occasion with his first sky dive. Using a rainbow-colored parachute, he took six minutes to float to earth from 4,500 feet. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “I’m going to do it twice more--at 10-year intervals.” His jump, over an airfield near Sheridan, Ore., raised about $1,000 for a hearing aid program for underprivileged children run by the Fraternal Order of Eagles. “The feat I’m doing today is not much, but the cause is pretty good,” Sipe said. After the jump, his friends gave him a birthday party, but his wife, Frances, stayed home and was not too thrilled about his new activity. In fact, she said: “I was speechless. Anything that’s different, he does. But this is the worst.”