Computer Smell Interface (and other senses)?

People keep trying to add other senses to the computer interface. As a software developer, I’d like to be able to deliver an electrical shock to some computer users, but I think that adding smells is just a bad idea. Imagine that we all have computers that can generate smells under program control. Then imagine ten million computers infected by the “skunk” virus. Or worse…

A Cautionary Tale:

This morning I hosted a five hour classical music radio program. I wrote a little computer program to choose music randomly from the 3500 CDs in the station’s regular classical collection. I spent some thought on this program, because I wanted each “run” of the program to tell me everything I needed to know: choose which shelf, choose the “nth” jewel case on the shelf, which CD in the jewel case, which track to play. The program was very simple, so I hardly tested it.
The second time I ran it this morning, the program produced exactly the same numbers as the first run. “Idiot”, I told myself. (I realized it would produce the same numbers EVERY time.) I quickly chose something the old-fashioned way, and while that was playing, I modified my program to produce differing results.
Simplicity is fine, but each computer program still deserves to be well-tested.
And it turns out that my random number program has excellent taste in music.

The unique author of the Wizard of Oz:

There are about fifteen OZ books, and most of them demonstrate an extraordinary skill of Frank Baum’s that is rare among writers for young children. If you will kindly pick up your copy of the Wizard of Oz, remembering that it’s not the same as the movie, and skim it for a few minutes, you’ll quickly notice this skill. There’s plenty of plot and action in these books but very little suspense. Quandaries, problems and challenges develop, but are usually disposed of a few pages later.


Many young children – old enough to enjoy it when you read books to them – are not ready to handle suspense. It can make some kids extremely uneasy. Frank Baum never lets these youngsters down.

This Just In, movie lovers:

Mel Gibson is so delighted with the success of his "Passion" movie that he's planning a sequel. I'm not sure what the sequel will be about (!) but it's going to be called: "Lethal Passion 2."

Scent lacks Direction:

I was once walking our Basset Hound on the nearby college campus. Another dog was about 50 feet away. Both had their noses to the ground and did not see each other. After a while my dog crossed a place where the other dog had been walking. Nose still down, she started to trace the exact path I knew the other dog had walked. Then the other dog reached a point where my dog had been, and now each was carefully following the other’s track. The dogs proceeded to separate, as each was tracking the other backwards in time. You never see dogs make this mistake when they track criminals in movies.

"Amateurs." Indentured Servants?

The March 9, 2004 New York Times Science section had a fascinating article about archeology and history of the ancient Greek Olympics. The article included one jarring note for me: "The athletes, although considered amateurs, were allowed to accept cash and valuable gifts before and after competing." The reporter seems to feel that the modern idea of "amateur" is right, and the ancient Greeks were an anomaly.
Actually, the modern concept of “amateur” was modeled on the Greek idea, but mistakenly forbid amateurs to take compensation. This peculiarly modern concept discriminates in favor of the gifted idle rich, and against brilliant but poor athletes who often must take illegal payments in order to work the many hours per week that their sports require. Forbidding the athletes to receive money strangely causes those who police this policy to keep much more of the available dough. Olympics administrators slaver over all the money the sports bring in.
At many colleges, the major sports are run as highly profitable businesses, except that the employees are officially not allowed to receive even the minimum wage. If college star athletes had to be paid what they were worth, the “business” of major college sports would quickly lose its profitability and wither back to where it belongs: as an amateur experience that’s good for well-rounded students. I’d like to see every big university try to collect from its alumni football supporters to pay their star starters each $100,000+ per year. Succeed or fail, it would be poetic justice for me.

Civilization evolves over time:

You know that already of course. If you’re awash in digital music and bemoaning how insensitive we’ve become to graphic violence, not to mention the prevalence of terrorist attacks, you know the times are a-changing. Still, I saw one of the more remarkable aspects of change in the New York Time Op Ed page recently. A third-of-a-page article - in small type no less - attempted to explain Einsteinian Relativity, to show why Newtonian Physics is inadequate, to discuss problems that Quantum Mechanics raises, and to try to change our view of Time. Now in Contrast: In the 1950’s it was fashionable to say that perhaps ten people in the world understood Einstein. No one would have thought to popularize his ideas in small print.

What’s the difference between:

What’s the difference between being hungry and being anxious? In fact, many of us have trouble telling the difference, the physical sensations are quite similar. (If you want to know who we are, here’s a useful clue – you can ignore thin people.) Don’t confuse fear and its dry mouth symptom, with the very different symptoms of anxiety.

I've made a small change in how comments are handled on this Blog. (I'm on the paid server now, not the free one.) I lost a few comments making the transition (my fault, not Enetation's), but I hope that comments will be processed better in future. Please keep making them, you often make my day!

Glern:

And now, let’s describe a scene from Queen Victoria’s 12th regnal year: the angler steps across the stream, avoiding a gnarl at the base of the sequoia, and onto a great white rock. Poised, his large hand grips the rod, he casts. The fly catches in a tree, the reel fills with horrid knots, and we learn his anger. Sorry, I should have posted this last Friday.

A Sporiginal Oonerism

William Spooner gave his name to the slip of the tongue in which you swap the beginnings of two words. Like Yogi Berra, he said less than has been attributed to him, but he may well have chided a lazy student thus: "You have tasted the werm."

One evening when I was sixteen and in summer camp, Louie, a friend, came by to commiserate. He had tried to ask a girl out, and he was pretty sure their liking was mutual. But he had said several wrong things and she had turned him down. Louie lit a cigarette, took a sad puff and said ruefully, "I'm a fupid stool."

Flavored Coffee?

What do you think, is it nice to have some arcane flavor in your coffee? I have great respect for the industrial strength chemicals -- impregnated into coffee beans – that manage to remind me of some flavor or other. I have even more respect for the chemicals in bottles that you can squirt into your cup.
But really, if you like added flavor, you’ll do better to provide it yourself, even if you’re buying the cup of coffee. For example, put a vanilla bean in a jar of sugar for about a month, and you’ll be able to sweeten your coffee with a fresh, delicious vanilla flavor. You should also consider some of the great, traditional coffee additives that you might not find in contemporary flavored coffees:

• Cardamom: Goes particularly well in Turkish coffee, but it’s good with any coffee style. You can try sprinkling the powder into your cup, but you get the best results by removing cardamom seeds from their pod and grinding them with the coffee beans (I do about one pod per cup.) Cardamom coffee is popular in Greece, south-eastern Europe and Eastern Asia.
  
• Anise: Same treatment (powder or seeds) as above. Anise seeds are easier to deal with than Cardamom, they do not come in a pod.
  
• Chicory. Originally (perhaps) intended as a coffee substitute or to deal with coffee shortages. They like chicory in France and in New Orleans.
  

Some Baltimore Voter has a great sense of Humor:

Avi Rubin, a serious critic of eVoting computer security, got himself some valuable experience by serving as a judge in the 3/2/04 Baltimore Primary election. He wrote up his day’s experience. Here’s a quote:
Perhaps the lightest moment in the day came when one voter standing at his [voting] machine asked in the most deadpan voice, "What do I do if it says it is rebooting?" Head judge Marie turned white, and [Diebold-knowledgeable judge] Joy's mouth dropped. My heart started to beat quickly, when he laughed and said "just kidding." There was about a two second pause of silence followed by roaring laughter from everyone.


And by the way, here’s Rubin’s comment on that reaction: Everybody was willing to believe that this had happened, and yet when it became clear that it didn't, we all felt relief. I'm sure that the other judges would have claimed that this was impossible, and yet, for a brief instant, they all thought it had happened.

We are closer to passing the Turing Test:

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test that might determine whether a computer can express intelligence. (Of course the test is not gospel, and its terms have been critiqued ever since.) The t h e t u r i n g t e s t p a g e web site paraphrases this test as follows:
The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal, therefore can't see her counterparts. Her task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human only by asking them questions. If the machine can "fool" the interrogator, it is intelligent.


Some bizarre progress has recently been made towards passing this test. Search this page for the word “Natachata” and the discussion that follows. (The page discusses spam issues inaccurately, and makes overblown claims towards passing the Turing test.)
Natachata is software widely used that chats erotically with people who visit Porn web sites. Each copy of Natachata may have thrown some human ero-chatters out of work. The article has interesting anecdotes about people clearly taken in by the program, and also a rather spooky note: some people who figure out that they are flirting with a computer rather than a person, seem to prefer it that way.

Lightly Warmed Ice Cream:

I hope you know that ice cream does not taste best right out of the freezer. Ice cream must be kept very cold to preserve it, but to really savor the taste, you need to let it warm up and lose its sense of solidity. So in order to enjoy ice cream properly, you must be patient. Or, you need a microwave.
You’ll have to experiment, but after a few tries (and if you eat lots of ice cream, we’re talking mere days here), you’ll find just the right setting for a good-sized portion in your favorite microwave-safe dish.
We have a very weak microwave, so I usually do 10 to 18 seconds. I suggest you start with about four seconds if you have a powerful unit.
Microwaving ice cream is intuitively off the charts, but the results are excellent. (Add the maple syrup before you microwave.)

Human (click!) Nature:

Here’s a quote from an article at Wired about battling the MyDoom virus:
But with viruses increasingly well-hidden, Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure's antivirus research director said the responsibility for protection ultimately will come down to technology firms because people have proven they cannot resist clicking on mysterious attachments.
"I've lost my faith in education. It never helps, people will never learn.... They will click on everything," he said.
Personally, I don’t believe people are so naïve. I think the experts should assume that some disaffected, unhappy and disbenefitted employees are clicking on virus the attachments intentionally. I also suspect that some people get into a “groove” processing their many emails, where a click on the next attachment becomes utterly routine.

ENLARG:

“ENLARG” is a neat set of letters. You can anagram it (that is, rearrange the letter order) to form two different hard-to-discover six-letter English words. You can also remove any single letter (except one of them) and anagram the remaining five to make at least word.
While you’re at it, if you’re in the mood, think of the shortest English (?) word containing all five vowels; it’s quite short.


By the way, the blogging format (reverse chronology) presents a problem here. If I give the answers in a few days, won’t most people read the answers before they read the questions?
True to the simple style of this blog, I plan to solve that problem without using any fancy hidden HTML. The answers will be posted in the first week of March.

You say you’ve got a painful sore throat?

If it hurts to talk; if you’re worried about getting laryngitis, try this: when you speak, pitch your voice just a little higher than usual. (Most people are very self conscious about doing this, but really, a little pitch change is not going to bother your friends. The cold makes you sound weird already.) You may find that at a higher pitch, you're not hurting your throat. And if that’s the case, you’ll know it pretty quickly.

Recursive Humor:

The last panel of today's Doonesbury Comic strip (dated 2-26 in the strip) has an image of today's Doonesbury Comic strip which, if you look carefully, contains an image of today's Doonesbury Comic strip which, well, with the resolution that newspapers allow Garry Trudeau, that is about as far as you can go.
I remember a Charles Addams cartoon (1940's I think) showing a scene in a old-fashioned barber shop with mirrors for walls. The cartoon has many re-reflections of the scene within the mirrors, all quite faithful, except that at about the seventh deep reflection, the man sitting in the barber chair is replaced, just once, by a monster.
You can find the Doonesbury strip here.

I once found an Income Tax Loophole all by myself:

When I was a graduate student I was given a “Research Assistant” position that paid a little, and I was advised by the University that I had to pay taxes on this income, and furthermore my tuition (a vaguely similar amount) was not tax deductible. I decided that my tuition was deductible. I explained my innovation to a university lawyer, who announced that I was just being silly. However I took my own advice for two years. In our filings, I explained in detail what I was doing, and the IRS never complained. Perhaps they had bigger fish to fry.
One of the few ways you could deduct tuition then was: that you would lose your job if you did not take this schooling. (The exemption clearly addresses professions where you are required to take courses to stay competent or accredited.) My R.A. position was a type of job given ONLY to graduate students. Therefore, if I stopped going to school I would of course lose my job. Now it’s painfully obvious that I turned the exemption on its head, but still think it applied. Logic is a wonderfully fuzzy thing.

Oops! Sorry, Sorry:

I Know nothing can be done about it now. Sorrrrry!
(Never interrupt someone in the middle of a cut and paste operation.)

Car Wheel Patterns:

Car wheels are one of the great triumphs of Computer-Assisted Engineering. Twenty or thirty years ago, they mostly looked the same. Now, every car seems to have a different pattern in the metal radiating from the center to the outside of the wheel. An artist can try out designs in a computer drawing program, then quickly do stress and cost analyses to decide whether a beautiful or striking wheel is safe and not too expensive.
Here’s a way to enjoy wheel patterns. (Not all eyes and brains are the same, so this may not work for you.) At night, when you’re stopped at a red light and cars are whizzing across your field of view, focus your eyes on your steering wheel and don’t try to track the traffic. As cars cross your field of view, their spinning wheels will paint brief, rotating patterns for your enjoyment.

Should I write a letter to the newspaper?

Two years ago, if I had an interesting thought about a newspaper story, I would write to the paper. The New York Times has published three of my letters, so I always feel I’ve a chance of getting published again. But now I can respond in this blog instead of writing a “letter to the editor”. I’m addressing a different audience (a smaller one but more classy of course), but I’m certain to be published. I wonder if newspapers get as many letters as they used to.

How do you handle Tailgaters when there’s no passing lane?

I’ve heard many suggestions in my time, and I’m too embarrassed to say which ones I’ve tried:

• Speed up: Not a good idea unless the tailgater (“TGTR”) just reminded you that you were driving WAY to slow.
  
• Pull over asap and let them pass: If you’ve never tried this, you have no idea how much fun it can be to watch them switch to tailgating the car in front of you.
  
• Slow down to the proper speed: If the TGTR is three car lengths behind you, slow to thirty; if one length behind you, slow to ten. Although this approach is logical, it tends to infuriate the TGTR, who hasn’t a clue what you’re doing.
  
• Alternately blink your directional signal lights: right, left, right, left … I wish this were the UNIVERSAL “don’t Tailgate” signal. Instead, it’s simply an illegal action that (for all I know) can get you ticketed. But it does make the TGTR think you’re crazy; they’ll drop back or do anything to get away from you. (I invented this one myself.)
  
• Pump your brake and speed up: The idea is that they’ll slow down when they see your brake lights and then you’ll be ahead of them for at least 0.3 seconds. Of all the crazy, stupid, risky…
  
• Using your trusty wireless PDA, look them up on the Internet, call their cell phone number, and tell them you KNOW where they live. This might be practical in a few years, but you could easily have an accident before you complete the call, so never mind.
  
• Using your trusty wireless PDA, hack into the computer that controls their car and … well, we can dream, can’t we?
  

In any case, try to let the tailgaters get to their destinations as quickly as possible. They’re not likely to live as long as you, so they need to rush every minute.


More seriously, the greatest danger a tailgater creates is that there will be an accident if you have to brake suddenly. Make sure this can’t happen, by arranging to have an immense field of open view in front of you, with no need to make quick decisions.

Just pointing to a URL today:

I rarely do the sort of blog entry that just points to another bit of the Internetosphere, but today’s an exception. This is so sweet:
Blinded Owl Gets New Sight With Operation. I hope it re-adjusts to the wild.

Do you like both Babaganoush and Salsa?

If you do, combine them in nearly equal quantities and eat the mix straight. Delicious, with no extraneous ingredients.

And smaller plug-ins to bite ‘em:

In a previous blog entry (click on this link and scroll up a little:) And So Ad Infinitem, I suggested that people playing the online Sim City game could escape from the impinging real world by starting to play a Sim City game-within-the-game (and so on). My idea may be ridiculous, but apparently it’s not totally impractical. You can read about “… a fan-made plug-in that allows Sims characters to effectively play SimCity inside The Sims. …” Get your recursion jolt of the day right here.

I really shouldn’t post this suggestion:

First, let’s agree that if you’re using a shared computer (at work, say), then you should NOT let your browser remember your passwords and make it trivially easy to log in. Right? It’s tempting though, isn’t it? But don’t ever do it. Not at all. Period. But if you want to, uh, compromise, uh, … NO COMPROMISES!


But if you still want to compromise, you might do this. Type a password that’s approximately correct, with a mistake near at the end. Try to log in and let your browser remember that. Then the next time you log in, you’ll just have to enter the correction to the password, saving some typing. Anyone else trying to log in as you will be frustrated. But we’d never do this, right?


While we’re at it, I’ll point out again that if web pages presented you with a picture of a keyboard, letters in RANDOM positions, to type your password by clicking the right letters – then even a spyware program monitoring your every keystroke and mouse motion would not be able to detect your password. I think I have a good idea here, but I’ve never seen it used.

Ice, the Enemy:

Snow that fell weeks ago has congealed into sheets of ice edging our sidewalk and driveway. When the temperature rises to 50 F and the sun beats down, the ice hardly melts. Its secret is a good bond with the ground, enabling it to dissipate heat quickly below. But at the edges of the ice there is melting, and at the edges it no longer touches the ground. I stamp on these edges, breaking them off. Without their connection to the main ice sheets, they will quickly fall prey to the sun. Each day there is progress, and I stamp some more. Of course the ice will melt eventually on its own, but if another snowfall comes soon, I want to have as little ice under it as possible. I have no idea whether I’m hurrying the melting process or not, but it feels good to try.

How not to write quasi-spam:

Most of us are used to going through our email and quickly deleting, unexamined, anything that looks like spam. (You’ll find life easier if you use a Bayesian Filter to separate most of the spam for you.) When you email to others, be careful that your mail doesn’t LOOK like spam. If you’re lucky, the recipient will glance at both the address and the subject line before hitting the delete key. If your email address is something like Lucky6047@aol, and you’re sending to a mere acquaintance, then the subject line is ALL you’ve got. Aside from the truly no-brainer advice I might give you, please think about this:


Don’t use “Hi.” Don’t include the recipient’s name in the subject line, but do consider including our own. Try to write a subject line that really explains what the email is about. After you’ve written your subject line, read it; if it reminds you of any spam you’ve gotten lately, try again.

I Can’t come today, I have to buy a rope for my car:

When you’re asked to do something and you decide to say no, do you give an excuse? It’s usually better just to say a polite no. The other person will usually think of a plausible excuse for you that’s much nicer than the truth, and definitely better than the fib you were about to make up. Now there are people who will infer the worst possible motives when you say no, but most of them will not believe your good reasons anyway; these are truly lost causes. You’ll generally seem like a much nicer and more helpful person if you just smile warmly and say: “I’m sorry I can’t come today.” Trust me on this one. Everybody has some deep insight into human nature, and this one is mine.

“Carb” is in!

Boing Boing says: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Carbohydrate-Free Lunch.
It’s amazing how many foods now have the word Carb (it’s a word?) on their packaging. I think the food industry was missing something. They can spend their ad dollars to hype any simple concept, then put that concept on their food. Stay tuned for “Off-shore food”, “Federal deficit food”, ‘Super bowl halftime food”, “There’s life on Mars food”. Meanwhile, it’s all “carb”:

• Low Carb Flour !
  
• Low Carb Olive Oil !! (Thanks, EGR.)
  
• Low Carb Cream Pies !!!
  
• Low Carb Cola !!!! (Watch that Carb Dioxide.)
  

Illegitimi non carb (Don’t let the bastards feed you fad food).