He's only running for the VERMONT Senate. Trust me, as a citizen of Vermont though not Washington County, NOTHING that has to do with national security ever happens in the VT Senate. Not unless it has something to do with cows or the next invasion of the US by the Empire of Quebec.

Of course that doesn't mean we're handling them as well as others may have in the past. I don't subscribe to the notion that we're especially better or worse though. It is just an eminence illusion, today's problems always seem worse, more urgent, more significant, than those we read about in history books (sorry, on Wikipedia). lol.

I think the assumption that there's anything impossible about doing it is what is wrong. I also think we are definitely reaching the levels of processing power necessary to meaningfully attack these sorts of problems. Nothing will every do it exactly like a human, but the path to doing it better than the best human is clearly open ahead of us. I can see a world where you can have EVERYTHING parsed for you into an ideal form for you particularly to understand it best. Is the govt going to get a super-human system out of this? No, probably not, it will be a few more generations. The work is interesting though and will lead to even better stuff. It may well be usable as-is too.

Are you maybe confusing metaphor with idiom? Idiomatic speech could truthfully be impossible to interpret without knowledge. A metaphor OTOH is a type of analogy. It operates on the basis of similarity or likeness with something else. It is thus amenable to logical analysis. Take your example, would someone who has not heard this example before understand it? I think it is self evident the answer is yes. It is therefor proven that this metaphor is open to computational analysis.

As language changes some metaphors could become incomprehensible or nonsensical, sure. This is just a problem for all linguistic analysis at some level. Again, the question is are you confusing metaphor with idiom. Most idiom arises somehow out of logical association, but it can be so idiosyncratic that it isn't really amenable to much analysis. Still, I think analysis of these kinds of speech constructs is possible.

So, got a schedule for the big world takeover? Really, I haven't seen even the faintest sign of fact-based ANYTHING in this country since 1980. Things are starting to go seriously wrong...

Eh, I have yet to meet a firearm that gave me any more than the most trivial problems. Certainly left-handed firearms are nice, but in a practical sense both sorts work fine. Working the safety on a pistol quickly is probably the least convenient feature of wrong-handed hand guns.

It isn't a big deal. Most everyday items don't favor one hand or the other. Spears, knives, and even swords pretty much fall into this category, as do quite a lot of other tools. Scissors and similar cutters are sort of an exception. So chances are this wasn't a really large problem. In a pinch you can just use things right-handed (and most lefties are less hand-polarized than righties, maybe do to the convenience of being able to use either hand, for instance I'm perfectly happy doing many tasks with either hand like cutting with scissors).

As for greater cooperation if you have two warriors and one is left handed he can guard the more exposed right flank of his partner and vice-versa. Alexander the Great had a whole cadre of left handed warriors who would take up the far right hand flank of his army (and I'd suspect this was probably fairly standard for ancient armies). The question then is really is there a strong enough difference in cooperation vs competition advantage from different-handedness for it to matter. This study doesn't seem to have addressed that question. At best it can be used like a prior to say "well, maybe it is that way since we DO have 10% lefties." I'm always a little suspicious of that sort of "Bayesian" kind of interpretation since it also leads to such absurdities as the notion that this generation will be the last one in history (do some reading on Bayesian Analysis, lol).

No, it wasn't actually...

"Cooperation favors same-handedness—for sharing the same tools, for example. Physical competition, on the other hand, favors the unusual. In a fight, a left-hander would have the advantage in a right-handed world."

This is simply taken axiomatically as a starting point for the study. I see no indication that it was determined by any sort of analysis. I'm not even sure such an analysis is feasible. You'd have to know what activities people carried out in prehistoric times, how, and what the value of cooperation was for each one. There could be various advantages and disadvantages of same or opposite handedness depending on the activity, etc. The entire concept of their study rests ENTIRELY on the validity of this same-handedness is better for cooperation proposition. I'm not saying it is untrue, but without demonstrating it to be true and to what degree I cannot see how any meaningful conclusions can be drawn.

are like the wolves amongst you right-handed sheep, right!!!!???

I'm not ENTIRELY convinced, what about situations where it is advantageous for people to have opposite handedness for optimal cooperation? There seems to be a built-in assumption here that different-handed assortments of people will always have more problems working together. I'm not sure there's a practical way to test this as a general thing though.

That's new! ROFL. Lets see, which member's districts will this money go to...