IT Insights Blog — training

Spring is just around the corner, and that means that baseball players are, um, already shagging fly balls and taking BP. Hey, you think spring training can wait until, you know, spring is actually here? Not a chance. The Arizona-based Cactus League tossed out the first pitch on Feb. 21, while the Grapefruit League kicked off in Florida on Feb. 22. It's hardly reasonable to expect baseball players to be ready to play 180 games if they don't get started early.

Technically there is no such holiday in the United States as "Presidents Day." The federal holiday that is observed on the third Monday of February each year is Washington's Birthday, as established by an Act of Congress in 1789. As a result of passage of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act in 1971, however, the Washington's Birthday holiday can never actually fall on Feb. 22, which most historians agree is the date, in 1732, that George Washington was actually born.

Fairly often in life, most people end up in this or that situation where they feel at least a little bit overwhelmed and usually a lot underqualified. As the philosopher David Byrne described it, "You may find yourself in a beautiful house / With a beautiful wife / And you may ask yourself, 'Well / How did I get here?" Oh, yeah. It can be a little freaky. As Byrne suggests, "You may tell yourself / 'This is not my beautiful house!' / And you may tell yourself / 'This is not my beautiful wife!' "

A day of reckoning is nearly upon us. Coming up next week, in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, just as men and women everywhere are sleeping off the hedonistic revels of the four-day holiday weekend, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will politely request the attention of people from across the nation and around the world as they make a very special announcement that 3D movie projection ought to be banned forever.

There's an old inspirational maxim that goes something like this: "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve." Such is the power of assonance ... to cause pithy inspirational adages to linger in memory. The power of the mind to believe things into existence is, well, less readily demonstrable. Science fiction authors and others have been conceiving technologies beyond the grasp of modern engineering for generations, after all.