2012 - The Year in Review

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

There was an awful lot of news in 2012.  In my opinion, far too much—I’m actually kind of relieved I won’t be getting “Newsweek” anymore.  (I canceled because they’ve gone to an online-only format, but would have probably canceled anyway because they started running cigarette ads, which for me is automatic grounds for a lifetime boycott.)

If, like me, you did a halfhearted job of staying on top of all the news last year, you’re in luck:  in this annual post I recap the most important stories, and as a special bonus show how I’d actually already covered them in an easily-digested and (I hope) humorous way in the pages of albertnet.  As usual, I’ve had to stretch here and there to make this work, and there’s a fair chance that you’ll giggle at one or two of my gyrations.

January

Of course the really exciting story for January was the sinking of the huge cruise ship Costa Concordia, and the subsequent arrest of the captain, who abandoned ship early on.  It came out that he’d crashed it in the process of showing off, taking the ship in close to shore as a salute to some pals there.  Not surprisingly, he’d been drinking.  But not only that, he’d been drinking wine, and with a beautiful woman!  Every article I saw emphasized these things.  The Guardian wrote, “The captain who steered his 114,000-tonne vessel into rocks off the Italian coast last Friday was drinking wine at dinner with a ‘beautiful’ woman minutes earlier, a witness has claimed.”  The Daily Beast wrote that a “passenger told an Italian newspaper that Schettino had been drinking with an attractive blonde at 8:35 the night of the accident.”

Wine and fancy women … what could be more unbecoming for a ship captain to indulge in?  I have a strong feeling that he’d have gotten off easier if his drinking had been, instead, a couple cold beers with some guy friends.  Plus, he’d possibly have had more luck modulating his intake.  My “Ask Dr. Beer” post in January, which ran two days after the wreck for maximum timeliness, was designed to suggest all this without, I hoped, alienating the wine-loving readers of albertnet.  I all but openly scolded the Concordia captain:  “Ads for good booze always say, ‘Those who appreciate quality enjoy it responsibly.’  That’s a good start, but why should people who can’t appreciate quality be let off the hook?  They should behave responsibly, too!”

February

The important and exciting news event in February was “The Artist” winning the Oscar for Best Picture, and being the first silent film to win since 1927.  It’s important to acknowledge that “silent film” is really a misnomer, because “The Artist” also won the Oscar for best score.  To demonstrate my uncanny ability to predict the Oscar winner, two weeks in advance, I blogged at length about another “silent film” that should have won Oscars in these two categories.  Surely you already know what movie I’m referring to, and caught the sly reference right away when you saw my pre-Oscar post last year.  What?  You’re lost?  I’m referring, of course, to my two February posts about the movie “Pink Floyd The Wall” (here and here).

Maybe you haven’t seen that movie in a long time (in which case it’s time to find out which of your pals has the best home theater and go rent the DVD), and you don’t immediately recall that it’s a dialog-free movie.  Well, it is.  The main character, Pink (Bob Geldof) does have one line, but this line is the exception that proves the rule.  In fact, he manages to flub it.  What the audience hears—“Take that, fuckers!”—is not what his lips say, which is “Next time, fuckers!”  Maybe this glitch is what cost this fine movie the Oscars it so richly deserved.  (Best Picture that year went to “Ghandi”—yawn—and Best Adaptation Score went to “Victor/Victoria”—like anybody remembers a single note of that movie’s music.)

March

I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the big news in March, that being the long-awaited explanation of how waves and other ocean features can actually glow at night.  “National Geographic Daily News” broke the story here.  The article states, “The biological light, or bioluminescence, in the waves is the product of marine microbes called phytoplankton—and now scientists think they know how some of these life-forms create their brilliant blue glow.”

I paid tribute to this wonderful finding with my “Earth Hour” post.  Granted, it was a subtle tribute—Ididn’t lean too heavily on the light pollution angle, for fear of diluting my more important message about energy conservation (and the only slightly less important stuff about a three-pound gummy worm, Earth Hour haters, and grizzlies mating with polar bears). 

April

In April the business world was taken by surprise when Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram, a tiny company valued at only half that much.  As reported in the New York Times, Zuckerberg declared, “Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.” 

Do you reckon Zuckerberg was talking about photos of brilliant bioluminescent seascapes?  Yeah, right.  More likely this acquisition was simply the fastest way to drive up sexting traffic.  (Remember Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil?”  Perhaps Facebook’s should be, “Be evil.”)

I’m glad my daughters are too young for Facebook and Instagram.  The rapper Nas describes being shocked by his own daughter’s being caught up in this:  “This morning I got a call, nearly split my wig.  This social network said Nas go and get your kid.  She’s on Twitter, I know she ain’t gon’ post no pic of herself underdressed, no inappropriate shit, right.  Her mother cried when she answered.  Said she don’t know what got inside this child’s mind, she planted a box of condoms on her dresser then she Instagrammed it.”

If you’re thinking I should lighten up about social networks and teens, then I invite you to check out my April blog post “Dopamine, Parenting, and Social Media.” I’m not as well-spoken as Nas, but I gave my best shot at explaining why teenagers really shouldn’t be on Facebook and Twitter.

May

Big news—and welcome news, in my opinion—hit in May when Mayor Bloomberg proposed banning soft drinks in serving sizes greater than 16 ounces (click here for details).  As reported by the Washington Post, a spokesman for the American Beverage Association responded, “The city is not going to address the obesity problem by attacking soda, because soda is not driving the obesity rate.”  This certainly has an NRA-esque whiff of BS about it … he might as well say, “Sugary drinks don’t make people fat—fat makes people fat!”  McDonald’s tweeted, “We trust our customers to make the choices that are best for them.”  Yeah, McDonald’s, that’s been working out really well.

Perhaps it seems hypocritical for me to condemn sources of empty calories, because I devoted an entire blog post in May to describing my desperate quest for sugary substances.  I lamented, “The giant handful of gels I’d hastily grabbed somehow numbered only two.  I had two bottles of energy drink but no mix.  By the time I reached the ranger’s station on Diablo I’d gone through 1 2/3 bottles of the drink and both gels.”  I went on to describe my salvation in the form of free frozen green tea gelato:  “It tasted like lotion, that expensive lotion you get at spas.  Frankly I didn’t care for it whatsoever except it was free, it had 140 calories, and as I said before I had no plan for feeding myself.”  There’s no hypocrisy here though:  like all distance athletes, I represent a special case.  Someday I’m going to write an entire post about why buying soft drinks should require a special license.

June

There was an important Supreme Court ruling in June, but it didn’t get much press; halfway through the year people must have already been tired of serious news.  ABC News came to the rescue with a classic fluff piece about Bon Jovi launching a new line of pasta sauces.  That was the headline, anyway.  In actuality, it wasn’t the singer who launched the product, but his father, whose name isn’t really Bon Jovi.  Both father and son are actually named Bongiovi, which is a great name for a pasta sauce but perhaps not the best for a rock star.  So, to recap:  a rock singer who is not named Bon Jovi didn’t launch a pasta sauce, but his non-famous father did.

Naturally you'll wonder why I didn't include anything about this in my June advice column, “Ask Dr. Pasta.”  Well, it’s because nobody wrote in to ask about it!  What?  You thought I made up all those questions?  You think “Ask Dr. Pasta,” and “Ask Dr. Beer” before it, were fake advice columns?  You think there’s no such person as Chip M of Boston, MA or Lawrence H of Greensboro, NC?  Well ... you’re right.  But if Bon Jovi isn’t really Bon Jovi, can’t I cut some corners too?

July

Needless to say, the biggest story of the year came out in July:  the discovery—or possible discovery—of the Higgs boson.  The importance of this scientific achievement cannot be overstated.  In fact, it cannot be understated, or even stated, unless you’re a rock star of the scientific world.  After reading several accounts of this discovery by very enthusiastic writers with great flair for confusing the reader, I’ve decided this Higgs boson thing should be nicknamed “the Emperor’s new particle.”  (The most helpful reference I found on this is here, though the “American Voices” feature in “The Onion” was also helpful, with a woman on the street declaring, “Yeah, the Higgs boson is getting a lot of attention, but there are a lot of lower-profile bosons that are worth checking out if you get the chance.”)

Perhaps most noteworthy thing I can point out about the Higgs boson was that it was just about the only thing that is universally acknowledged to be “a thing” that I didn’t mention in my July “Deliverance and Cycling Tioga Pass” post, a sprawling epic docucomedventurdrama covering such diverse topics as camping, cycling, logical fallacies, missing receipts, Mono Lake, Vladimir Nabokov, paranoia, RVs, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, Tioga Pass, the undistributed middle, and Yosemite National Park.  And yet, to those who actually understand boson particles, this post, upon careful reading, turns out to be a masterpiece of understatement and subtle insinuation.  The story is, in fact, thoroughly flooded with between-the-lines illumination of the true nature of the Higgs boson.  If anybody ever creates the literary equivalent of the CERN particle accelerator, I will finally enjoy the sterling reputation I have so long deserved.

August

The most exciting news in August was the Curiosity rover landing on Mars.  This wouldn’t be such a big deal if the rover were simply a remote-controlled vehicle.  The really cool thing is that it will be able to think for itself when it gets its next software update, as described here. 

Speaking of thinking for yourself, I hope I don’t need to point out the obvious tie-in between this rover news and my three-part albertnet series on Artificial Intelligence that ran in August and September (click here, here, and here).  Naturally, being more interested in Earth than Mars, I focused my investigation on real-world—as in, our real-world—applications, such as whether you can speak into your iPhone and have it transcribe the text.  As I noted in my post, the iPhone does just well enough to be dangerous:  “I need to make some videos about the iPhone 4S” comes out “I need to make some videos about the iPhone 4 ass.”  I hope the Curiosity rover does better.

September

I know that I could drive lots of traffic to this blog by focusing on a really splashy news item for this month—namely, the release of the iPhone 5—but I’m not going to take the bait.  I also won’t pretend that the “Gangnam Style” Youtube video was actually important news.  (I’m hoping that using the phrases “iPhone 5” and “Gangham Style Youtube” twice each will be enough to get me a lot of pageviews.)  Well-informed people worldwide know that the big news this month was the groundbreaking BYU study finding that exercise can reduce the urgeto eat.

It’s kind of a shame this article beat me to the press (by just one day!) and thus my own article, “Nutrition for Endurance Cycling,” didn’t cause as great a sensation.  Echoing the BYU article, in my nutrition post I lament the lack of appetite I have right after a long bike ride, when eating is important:  “For about half an hour after hard exercise, sugar taken in goes directly into replacing muscle glycogen instead of being absorbed the normal way.  In other words, you’ll recover more quickly if you consume carbs during this ‘glycogen window.’  So, right after my ride, during which I drank a whole gallon of energy drink, guess what I get to do?  Have some juice, maybe some sweetened yogurt, a few Girl Scout cookies."  Yuck.

October

This month brought another toss-up for top news story:  Hurricane Sandy, or Felix Baumgartner parachuting from space?  Two things have swayed me to choose the latter.  First, Hurricane Sandy was downgraded from a full hurricane to a “super-storm,” which has the hackneyed sound of a Wal Mart promotional slogan.  Second, hurricanes are becoming so routine now, they'll eventually cease to make the news at all, along with senseless school shootings.  But parachuting from space?  That’s a totally new one.

Did albertnet cover Baumgartner’s exploit?  Well, not exactly, but it covered a similarly daring and/or foolish challenge that I myself took on.  What’s that?  You don’t remember it?  Well, didn’t I do something difficult involving altitude?  Didn’t I too fall to earth, albeit metaphorically, like a modern day Icarus?  Didn’t I too fuel myself with Red Bull?  (Okay, in my case it was sugar and caffeine from Cytomax and NoDoz, respectively, but we’re still talking about the core components of Red Bull.)  The main difference between my adventure and Baumgartner’s is that his looked really amazing though it came off without a hitch, while mine would have looked pretty boring and yet went horribly.  Oh, yeah:  and my brain, not Baumgartner’s, was a thin porridge by the end.  Check out this post if you don’t believe me.

November

Am I a man?  Well, my kids, when asked this question, usually say something like “Not really—you’re just a big daddy guy.”  It’s safe to say, however, that I’m a male, because I can’t see the forest for the trees, or however that goes.  To wit, I failed to notice an important post-election news story concerning a novel solution to the problem of leftover campaign signs.  A guy up in the Pacific Northwest recycles them, turning them into bicycle accessories:  “Peterson occasionally holds workshops in the art, demonstrating how he reuses the corrugated plastic material that’s used for lots of front yard-type political signs.  He cuts the sheets with a sharp craft knife or scissors into desired shapes and then stitches pieces together with nylon cable ties.  On some items, he uses a more sophisticated technique involving scoring the plastic and folding it.”

This is almost as good as not having election signs in the first place, a desire I expounded upon in detail that month.

December

The big news I was waiting for in December is more notable for almost not being reported at all.  I’m talking of course about the outcome of the Novartis drug recall I blogged about last month.  Several drugs—Excedrin, Gas-X, and my precious NoDoz among them—were recalled by Novartis a year ago because quality control problems in the factory were resulting in broken tablets and, worse, prescription drugs such as Percocet getting mixed up with over-the-counter remedies.

Novartis finally did get its act together, but the media barely covered this.  I searched this evening on “excedrin recall” and got just five Google News hits.  Four of them were unrelated to this topic (e.g., “Female Orgasm:  Serving an Evolutionary Function?”), but one—exactly one—covered the return of Excedrin to the shelves.  This was the Patch.com site for Hazelwood, MO.  Its editor wrote, “When Hazelwood Patch announced the recall, the article quickly became one of our most viewed articles.”  I think it’s worth noting that this article didn’t mention Gas-X or NoDoz.  I guess Hazelwood citizens are an alert, non-gassy people who mainly get a lot of headaches.  A quick look at its home page offers, I think, some insight into why.  The main headlines for today:  “Elderly Woman Robbed at Gunpoint and Carjacked, Assailant Captured in North County”; “Man Breaks In[to] Hazelwood Pet Store”; and, “Ask the Patch Pro:  Seeking Gun Safety Experts.”  Other articles on the homepage include “Gun Brought to Mall” and “Mugs in the News:  The Faces That Made This Week’s Crime Headlines.”  All this really makes me appreciate my relatively peaceful community.  If our local Patch had covered the Novartis recall at all, they’d probably have focused on Gas-X, given the popularity of legumes and vegan fare here.

Conclusion

If you made it to the end of this lengthy post, I think the rest of your 2013 will be gravy!  And if you’re reading this long, long after the year 2012, I hope this recap gave you a good sense of what life was like in that difficult, exciting, tedious year.

Almost Intelligent - Part I

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

“Almost intelligent” might be a good name for somebody’s biography (or autobiography) but here I’m talking about artificial intelligence.  My last post described my experience chatting with an application called Cleverbot that tried to simulate human dialog convincingly.  Here, I’ll tackle the subject of AI language more generally, looking at speech recognition, natural language, and translation. 

Do we care?

If you really don’t care about AI at all, go read something else—or, better yet, read on to see why maybe you should care.

On the one hand, AI is very exciting.  As computers have become “smarter,” and easier to use, they’ve gotten so useful it’s hard to imagine how we ever did without them.  I’m thinking about Google, GPS and other mapping applications, package tracking, e-mail spam filters … the list goes on and on.

On the other hand, AI is a bit scary, and as a human I prefer to believe I could never be replaced by a computer.  I shudder at the thought that human behavior could be so unvarying and predictable that one day we’ll barely be better than a really good computer program.  I want my computer applications to get smart, but not too smart.

Voice recognition and natural language

There’s a button on the side of my smartphone that, when pressed, startles me by causing the speakerphone to say, “Say a command!”  I’m vaguely aware that my phone will respond to voice commands but have no interest in issuing them.  Most of the cool features of smartphones involve the silent, non-speech stuff you can do—e-mail, Internet browsing, etc.—as you’ll notice on the subway when half the people are silently tapping away.  (The popularity of texting—a way to privately communicate without being eavesdropped on by the person you’re ostensibly talking to face-to-face—is a classic example of how phones are becoming increasingly mute.)

That said, the iPhone’s voice-recognition application, Siri, seems to be making a bit of a splash.  (Nobody I know uses Siri yet, but I’m sure some will.)  This demo shows how Siri is pretty good at understanding speech and figuring out what you want it to do.  (I played with a Droid phone recently and it was also very good at typing for me as I spoke.)  The reviewer asks Siri, “Where can I have lunch?”  Siri replies, “I found fourteen restaurants whose reviews mention lunch.  Twelve of them are close to you.”  This seems easier than typing into Google on a little phone.  But the natural language feature isn’t perfect; the reviewer says, “How about downtown?” and Siri replies, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘how about downtown.’”

Perhaps Siri’s communication isn’t “connection-oriented”—that is, it doesn’t consider “how about downtown?” in the context of “Where can I have lunch?” but takes the two queries as totally discrete and unrelated.  If so, this is a major shortcoming. 

The reviewer tries again:  “I want to have lunch downtown.”  Siri replies, “I found 3 restaurants matching ‘downtown.’”  Useless!  Siri knows where the user is, geographically, but does not realize that “downtown” in this context pertains to location, not a restaurant’s name.  Here, Siri starts to look like a mere forwarder of requests, always passing the buck to Google instead of applying intelligence to the request.

Simple conversion of speech to text looks pretty good on Siri.  The reviewer dictated a message to it, and almost everything came out.  The notable exception was how Siri transcribed the reviewer’s spoken comment “I need to make some videos about the iPhone 4S.”  Siri typed, “I need to make some videos about the iPhone 4 ass.”  The reviewer doesn’t notice this gaff, telling the YouTube viewer, “There it is.  It figured out exactly what I wanted to say.”  Dangerous, don’t you think?  What if the reviewer meant to e-mail the text “S as in Sam” but actually e-mailed “ass as in Sam,” to his boss, Sam?

Not that Siri doesn’t try hard.  When the reviewer says, “Set a timer for 3 minutes,” Siri replies, “OK, I started a three-minute timer.  Don’t overcook that egg.”  Not bad.  Actually, it is bad.  For one thing, “that egg,” when spoken by Siri, comes out “ditek.”  Without the text on the screen you’d never understand what it said.  Meanwhile, it’s obvious that Siri is trying to be funny, and completely failing.  There’s nothing witty about Siri making a lame guess as to what the timer is for.  What’s worse, Siri could create the impression that three minutes is actually how long you should cook an egg.  In fact that’s not nearly enough time, and everybody knows an undercooked egg presents a salmonella risk.

A fundamental problem

Of course I’m nitpicking with the egg timer example, and (to a lesser extent) with the “ass” example, but they bring up an important point:  language, as one of the primary interfaces between humans, requires far more than just understanding what is heard and forming sentences in response.  Having a sanity-check reflex that keeps you from using words like “ass” in mixed company, and knowing whether your joke is actually funny, are complicated processes.  Verbal communication can be a minefield, especially for a computer application that stabs around in the dark.

Consider, for example, the old joke about the Texan who gets into Harvard.  While touring the campus, he asks a student, “Excuuuse me, can you tell me where the library’s at?”  The student replies haughtily, “Here at Haaarvard, we never end a sentence with a preposition.”  The Texan replies, “Okay, can ya tell me where the library’s at, asshole?”

Upon inspection, this exchange, though brief, is quite complex.  The Harvard student’s response to the Texan’s query shows a decision that might not occur to an AI application—that is, to a) not answer the question, and b) use the opportunity to deliver a scornful message about class and intellect.  The Texan’s comeback makes a statement about a) his refusal to be cowed, b) the difference between cultivation and innate intelligence.  Meanwhile, the joke as a whole counts on the listener enjoying an opportunity to feel superior to both Harvard students and Texans, while exulting in the surprise and wit of the punch line.  Worlds away from “Enjoy ditek.”

Maybe you think I’m overreaching here, that such nuance will never be expected of AI.  Maybe AI is just a tool to make machines more useful to humans, and little gaffs don’t matter much.  When a woman asks her husband, “Do these pants make my butt look fat?” he is instantly plunged into a terribly complicated interaction, because of his relationship to the woman.  So much hinges on his response.  If he says “yes” he’s obviously dead.  If he says “no” too vociferously, he seems patronizing.  He could try the reverse-psychology approach and say, “No, your butt makes your butt look fat,” but she better have a sense of humor and thick skin.  Or, he could ignore the question, or say, “Look, krill!”  Or he could say “yeahhh” lecherously (note that imparting this single syllable with the sense of “I want some of that!” is far beyond the current state of the art in AI voice synthesis).  But when a human asks Siri “Am I fat?” and gets back, “Here’s your a.m. alarm” and “I found 8 fitness centers fairly close to you,” he or she can more easily blow it off.

This idea—that computers don’t have to play nice when “talking” to humans—is strongly supported by a scene in “The Terminator” when the evil cyborg, confronted by his landlord—“Hey buddy, you got a dead cat in there, or what?”—scans through a menu of possible responses—“YES/NO; OR WHAT; GO AWAY; PLEASE COME BACK LATER; FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE; FUCK YOU”—and chooses the penultimate one.  Of course when you’re the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger you don’t have to have a friendly user interface.

That said, I would argue that, to the extent humans are to embrace AI when using electronic devices, precision and nuance do matter.  We have to trust these devices not to turn “S” into “ass,” not to waste our time with lists of restaurants we’d never eat at, and not to infuriate us with messages like “cannot undo.”  Even if you’ve never found yourself yelling profanities at your computer, I’m sure you’ve seen others do it.

Consider this cautionary tale.  My dad bought one of the first consumer-oriented computers in history, the Hewlett-Packard Model 85.  This was 1980, a year before the IBM PC.  the HP-85 was about as far from Siri (or at least the design intent of Siri) as you can get.  There was no software for it; you had to program it yourself.  Meanwhile, its version of BASIC was proprietary, diverging from the industry standard (e.g., you used the command “DISP” instead of “PRINT”).  I had my brother try out one of my first programs.  It prompted him to type his name.  With great hesitation—he was greatly fearful of doing something wrong and damaging our dad’s expensive machine—he typed “Max.”  Then he sat there waiting for something to happen.  Nothing did, because my program didn’t say anything about hitting the Enter key when done.  Max looked a bit nervous.  “It’s not working!  It’s not doing anything!” he cried.  I told him to hit Enter.  When he did, the computer promptly displayed the message “Max is a jerk” (the whole point of my program).  Max got really angry and flustered and to this day does not use a computer.  This probably isn’t just because of my program; the HP-85 was less than user-friendly and doubtless gave Max the wrong impression of where home computing was going.

Translation

Here is where the AI picture is, to me, much rosier.  Early attempts at translation, like Alta Vista’s Babelfish, were a joke.  You pasted the foreign-language text into a window, gave it the language to translate it into, and then were presented with a salad of translated words (with un-translated ones sprinkled like croutons) that made no sense at all.  The only real use for this tool was translating things into Tristan.

What’s Tristan?  Well, I used to have a colleague, a computer programmer, whose native-tongue language skills were so poor it was impossible to understand a thing he wrote.  His e-mails always gave my colleagues and me a laugh, and in his honor we invented a language and named it after him.  (It wasn’t really called Tristan, because his last name wasn’t really Tristan; I’ve changed it to protect him from possible embarrassment.)  To translate something into Tristan, you’d type normal text, translate it into French using Babelfish, and then translate it back to English.  The results were pure comedy, with not a shred of sense left intact.

I think people are naturally forgiving of poor translation, because we’ve studied grammar and foreign languages in school and can really appreciate how difficult a task this is.  Plus, the results are so often funny, they put us in a good mood.  Consider the urban legend that “Coca-Cola,” when first translated into Chinese, came out meaning “bite the wax tadpole.”  (To this day I’ll complain about something by saying it bites the wax tadpole.)  Brian Hayes, writing in “American Scientist,” makes an interesting comment about AI efforts to parse grammatical constructions when translating text:  “The failure of this approach is sometimes dramatized with the tale of the English→ Russian→ English translation that began with ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ and ended with ‘The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.’”

More recently, online translation engines such as Google Translate have gotten much, much better.  As Hayes describes, “The idea is to ignore the entire hierarchy of syntactic and semantic structures—the nouns and verbs, the subjects and predicates, even the definitions of words—and simply tabulate correlations between words in a large collection of bilingual texts.”  At first, this strikes me as a “brute force” approach that is further from artificial intelligence than earlier efforts, however hapless, to actually parse a sentence grammatically.  But as Hayes points out, the modern technique is actually lot closer to how humans learn to talk.  (It’s also more similar to how we would learn a foreign language if we had the good fortune to go live in another country, versus making our way with a textbook and classes.)

I first tried Google Translate when I was trying to track a package that was being shipped to me from a web merchant in France.  I have studied French for years, but understanding statements about logistics and customs offices would be difficult in any language.  I was presented with this:  “Votre colis est sorti du bureau d'échange.  Il est en cours d'acheminement dans le pays de destination.”  This would have totally tripped up the original Babelfish, but Google served up an entirely comprehensible translation:  “Your package is out of the office of exchange. It is in transit in the country of destination.”  (Not only was I delighted with how clear this was, I was relieved my package wasn’t stuck in customs.)  Translating this English back into French, and then back into English, I get “Your package is out of the office of exchange. It is in transit to the destination country.”  Very little of the “Tristan effect.”  (There’s some fuzziness around “to” vs. “in” with regard to the destination country, but I can live with that.)

To reassure myself then the Man of Letters wouldn’t be replaced by a machine anytime soon, I tried some poetry: 

But the Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

When I fed this into the new version of Babelfish (which works similarly to Google’s), and translated it into French and back, the response was this: 

But the Raven seductive yet all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a seat padded before the bird and bust and door;
Then, on the Velvet sinking, I hauled myself to tie Fancy: fancy,
Think what this bird threatening of antan - the sad bird, awkward, frightening,
Ghent and disturbing past Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

Aha!  Gibberish!  I was about to feel all smug about the superiority of humans over AI, but then tried Google Translation with the same English à French à English task: 

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
 I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
 Then, upon the velvet sinking me, I betook myself to linking
 Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
 What this grim, ungainly, ghastly bird, gaunt, and ominous of yesteryear
 Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

Wow.  That’s so good it’s creepy.  But before you despair and decide the computers will ultimately render the human race unnecessary, be sure to check out my next albertnet post, wherein I examine how well AI does playing games—another classic measure of its progress.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here. 

2011 - The Year in Review

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

After a long year of blogging I find myself facing the “year in review” post. If you don’t love the “year in review” format, you should:  this is how, if you’ve been ignoring world news for the last year, you can quickly come up to speed on the highlights.

You might well ask, “Who is this random blogger to be deciding what news events were most important?”  Well, I did spend last year basing my blog posts on the most important current events throughout the world.  If this statement makes you chuckle, read on because you may enjoy my rhetorical game of trying to make this outlandish statement seem reasonable.

January

The big news of January was of course the senseless shooting of nineteen people in Tucson.  I’m not going to make light of this or try to be funny because that would obviously be tasteless.  (Don’t worry, the rest of this post won’t be such a downer.)

During this month I wrote about a very strange dream I had about being shot.  Do you suppose guns show up in Americans’ dreams more than those of other cultures, where guns aren’t so readily available?  In other  words, what is the impact on our collective subconscious of knowing people around us could be armed?  (I actually did have a gun pulled on me once, by a complete stranger.)

We Americans take the ubiquity of guns for granted, so it amazes me that other developed countries are virtually gun-free.  In the “New Yorker” this week, America’s self-proclaimed “top cop” said, “The firearm problem in England is almost laughable in the sense of how small it is.  The gangs [there], I would describe as, basically, wannabes.”  In the same issue, a reporter interviews a Japanese policeman who deals with the “yakuza,” the Japanese organized crime syndicate:  “When I asked if he’d ever fired his gun, he said that he hadn’t even used his nightstick.”

February

Needless to say, the biggest news of February was the unveiling of “The Daily,” a British newspaper from Rupert Murdoch that is only available in the US and only for the iPad.  It goes without saying that when historians take the long view of 21st-century society, they will divide it into two epochs:  pre-Daily-for-iPad, and post.  About the only recent innovation that comes close to ushering in such sweeping societal change is the Segway.

What was Murdoch thinking?  How many Americans both a) want a British newspaper, and b) have an iPad?  I’m not trying to say the iPad isn’t popular, but compared to a regular computer?  (When I look at pageview stats for this blog, I see that less than 1% were from iPads.)  Perhaps Murdoch was just distracted by all the illegal wiretapping he and his staff were embroiled in.

Meanwhile, traditional printed newspapers offer so much:  the ability to line a birdcage; the ability to wrap fish; the ability to protect fragile plates and glasses when you’re packing up to move; even a way to keep your head somewhat dry when it’s raining and you’ve forgotten your umbrella.  Murdoch’s overblown excitement about electronic publishing ties in nicely with my February post “Death of a Bookstore” in which I describe why I want to hate the Kindle and why I think bookstores won’t go extinct.

March

I was really torn as to what was the biggest news for March:  the tsunami in Japan, or the big iPhone flap.  So I decided to let Google decide:  I typed “tsunami” into the search field and the first related search it gave me was “tsunami sushi sf.”  So I guess in the big scheme of things what happens in Japan, stays in Japan.

Which brings us to the other big news which is of course the iPhone glitch that caused the clocks on these phones to be turned back an hour instead of forward to adjust for Daylight Saving Time.  This meant users’ phone clocks were actually two hours off, and one user nearly missed yoga class.

If only people paid more attention to my blog!  In March I was all over Daylight Saving Time; embedded in my post is the simple solution to the problem, adopted by Russia, which is to abolish DST altogether.  (Russia’s abandonment of DST made the news in March, too, but unless you subscribe to the Moscow Times you won’t be able to read this article about it.  For a charming video on this decision, click here).

April

The big news in April was the speech given by British prime minister David Cameron in which he suggested that immigrants should learn English.  The Guardian story on this topic is an odd read, because it was published before the actual speech, and is written in the future tense:  “The prime minister will open his speech by saying,” and “Cameron will say,” and “The prime minister will stride into sensitive political territory when he accuses  …” and so forth.

My mention just now of the future tense, and my use of “read” as a noun, might have made some readers squirm.  Yes, such usage does beg the question, “Is it reasonable to require anybody to learn English as a second language, given how tricky a language English is?”  Also begging this question is my April post, “The Trouble with English.”  Actually, my post doesn’t beg the question, it simply poses the question.  Rhetorically.  And then answers it.  The phrase “begging the question” is exactly the sort of idiomatic expression that makes this language so difficult, though of course idioms are only the beginning of the problem.  Perhaps if Cameron had read my post, he’d have been more sensitive.  (No, of course that’s not true.)

May

In May I posted a rant against imbeciles who, in the name of journalism, cheat at sport and write about it.  The May issue of “Outside” magazine had a particularly annoying article by Andrew Tillin, an arrogant shitweasel who jacked himself up on testosterone so he could rider faster in meaningless 45+ races and think grand thoughts like “Take that, you motherfuckers.  There’s more.”  Except there isn’t, because despite cheating he still ended up in only 17th place because he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.  Then he actually makes money by writing a book about it.

Of course, I couldn’t just berate Tillin and his ilk without providing an alternative to their so-called journalism, so I did my own experiment where I donated two units of red blood cells to a blood bank, thus giving myself an athletic impediment roughly equivalent to the advantage gained by blood-boosting or using EPO.  I studied my performance decline closely and (unlike the doping journalists) provided a detailed, objective report with lots of charts and graphs, free, to my albertnet readers.

What I couldn’t have guessed when I posted that was how timely my post would be.  Later that month, Tyler Hamilton went on “60 Minutes” and admitted that he’d doped throughout his career, and claiming he saw Lance Armstrong use drugs as well.  This bombshell spawned all kinds of articles including this one.  The most remarkable development, though, is how mainstream this news topic has become.  Armstrong’s doping allegations were featured twice this month in “The Onion,” a mainstream online magazine not known for covering cycling.  Check out this feature and this one.

June

The big world news in June, of course, was of the deployment of troops in Yemen by the son of its injured and evacuated president, Ahmed Ali Saleh.  I won’t bore you with the details since you know them already, but I couldn’t help but to notice what a great Father’s Day gesture this was.  I mean, to deploy troops in the streets of the capital on Dad’s behalf… it’s really amazing.

I did my best to honor my own father with a Father’s Day post, but fondly recalling how he’d bawl out the cat or deny the family TV privileges just doesn’t hold a candle to stepping up and commanding a military.  I’d like to do more for my dad but I can’t.  It’s just how I was raised.

July

Of course July will be remembered for Australian Cadel Evans’ magnificent victory in the Tour de France, and more specifically, for the astonishing turn of events that transpired at the final victory ceremony, where Australian pop star Tina Arena sang the Australian national anthem.  As famously reported in Velo News, Evans remarked, “I was a bit surprised that Tina Arena came out to sing the anthem, that was very nice of her. … to stand on the Champs-Élysées with an Australian singing the national anthem … it’s not a dream that comes true for many Australians.”  Such humility in a true champion … I mean, Tina Arena? Are you kidding me?

As an American, though, I couldn’t help but wince when I read that news.  Of course I have no problem with my countrymen failing to win the Tour; it’s just that the national anthem of the U.S., which has been sung ten times at the Tour de France, is so fricking lousy.  When, earlier in the month, I posted an extended harangue against our anthem, I neglected to compare it to other anthems, such as Australia’s.  The Australian anthem is actually quite good; its clunkiest lyric, “Our home is girt by sea,” is far less embarrassing than the great number of bombastic and silly lines that disgrace the U.S. anthem like so much graffiti.

August

Needless to say, the big news this month was that Scotland finally took steps to combat its obesity problem.  (You’d think, with all the movies and TV shows the U.S. exports over there, that the Scots would have gotten the hint a lot earlier.  Is our world leadership waning?)  Suffice to say, the world rejoiced at the announcement that leading retailers in Scotland had pledged to take measures against obesity, such as displaying fruits and vegetables more prominently.

In an amazing coincidence (or did I get an advance tip?), during this same month I wrote not one but two posts about the food of Scotland:  this one and this one.  Oddly, I didn’t gain weight in Scotland, though I enjoyed all kinds of hearty fare, such as haggis (a mixture of the minced heart, lungs, and liver of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the slaughtered animal) and the famous Full Scottish Breakfast, consisting of a tattie scone (greasy), hash-brown cartridge (greasy and salty), bacon (‘nuff said), a large sausage lozenge called Lorne sausage (greasy, salty, generally alarming), and blood pudding (a chewy, mulchy little disk of congealed, salty pig’s blood).  That breakfast aside, I really liked the Scottish food, and I hope the retailers don’t change it too much.

September

In September, albertnet focused on cycling:  the US Pro Challenge, an epic ride I did in Colorado, and my food-heavy account of the Everest Challenge bike race.  I will now confess that I’d hoped one of these stories would win me the Ig Nobel prize for literature.  Alas, I didn’t even get a nomination.

Of course, I was up against some pretty stiff competition, as you’ll know if you followed the news on this subject.  The winner in the chemistry category had invented a wasabi-based fire alarm; another award was given for research on whether people make better decisions when they have a strong urge to urinate.  In the literature category the winning entry was the “Theory of Structured Procrastination.” I guess I can’t compete with that.  I was frankly stunned when this article won the prize, though, because I really didn’t think its author would ever finish writing it.

October

This month brought me more disappointment:  I posted two fiction pieces to albertnet, and neither of them won the Man Booker Prize.  (I realize the prize is only for writers from the British Commonwealth and Ireland, but I’m still disappointed.)  The second of my stories, “Before the Fall,” was hailed as a “heart-wrenching but also darkly funny tour de force” by … nobody!  So I lost out to the novel The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes.

Of course you’ll recall the scandal this prize caused this month, when the head judge described the novel as “readable.”  Whether this infuriated elite readers because it’s not sufficient grounds for awarding the prize, or whether it infuriated them because great literature isn’t supposed to be readable, is unclear to me.  In a Guardian article about the award, the winner brushed off the scandal, remarking, “Most great books are readable.”  I guess some obvious exceptions would be Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow.  (No, I haven’t read either of those.  How could I?  They’re unreadable!)

Barnes himself couldn’t help but praise his own prize-winning book, though in an oddly humble way:  “Those of you who have seen my book … will probably agree it is a beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we’ve come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the eBook, it has to look like something worth buying, worth keeping.”  So now I have four reasons to go buy The Sense of an Ending:  1) it won the Man Booker prize; 2) it is said to be readable; 3) it is a beautiful object; and 4) as I’ve said before, I want printed books to survive.

November

My most popular (or shall I say least un-popular) post for this month was “The British Faucet Conundrum.” So far it’s had  123 hits; one person #1’D it (whatever that means); one person flagged it as “Funny”; and it elicited two reader comments, only one of which was from a member of my family.  I’m happy to see it getting read, but at the same time I’m disappointed in the poor response (34 hits, no responses) to another post from November, “Spotting Bad Restaurants,” which I think is a very useful guide.  I provide a number of simple ways to recognize a bad place before it’s too late to leave.  If nothing else this could save you a number of rushed trips to the bathroom later.

Perhaps my restaurant post could have been researched better.  (Of course it could have, my research budget for this blog being ZERO.)  I missed a major criterion of a good restaurant, that being “Is it kid-friendly?”  If the big restaurant news for this month had hit sooner, my post would have been more complete.  I’m referring, of course, to the major revelation that a restaurant in London had started charging moms a “baby tax.”  As you know, they didn’t get away with it, and published an apology on their website stating “this is an isolated incident” and “we will be in contact with Natasha Young and Anna Sheridan with a personal apology for their mistreatment by our staff.”  Um ... unless the two moms dined together, wouldn’t that be two isolated incidents? 

Semantics aside, I have to believe the “baby tax” problem was related to the poor performance of individual restaurant staffers, not the policy of the restaurant’s home office.  Staffing problems are widely acknowledged among restaurants in the UK; one place I went to even admitted to it, right on the menu:

December

Okay, I’ll come right out and admit it:  I didn’t follow the news at all in December.  I was laid up at home all month with a broken femur, as I blogged about here, here, and here.  Pretty much the only major world news I read about was Lewis’s comeback.  What, you didn’t follow the story about Craig Lewis, the American pro cyclist who broke his femur during the Giro d’Italia back in May?  I suppose you were too engrossed in the doping allegations against Lance Armstrong to be following the athletes who are actually still racing.  Anyway, Lewis crashed in the Giro and broke his femur, and struggled to get back to racing, and eventually needed a bone graft because his leg wasn’t healing right.  I’ll be keeping a close eye on him next month to see how he does.  You should, too.

Conclusion

Well, so much for 2011.  I hope your 2012, and mine, are (even) better.  I’m so glad you made it to the end of this post.  Dare I hope this post ascended to the pinnacle of literary achievement, Readability?

dana albert blog

Smartphone

I got a BlackBerry. I have to say, it’s a pretty spiffy device. Are you annoyed with me for saying so? If not, I will proceed to enumerate its qualities. I can peek real quick at my e-mail, and calendar, without going to my PC and logging on. I can look at an online map when I’m lost, or check the Giro d’Italia results when I’m at my kid’s soccer game. It has a camera, and I can send the photos right to my e-mail instead of paying a cell phone company to transmit them to somebody. And I can “tether” my PC to it and enjoy wireless Internet access virtually anywhere.

Okay, now you’re annoyed. Good. I needed to get you to this place to prime you for my forthcoming examination of why such a seemingly innocent device can make normal people seem annoying, or at least bring out the latent annoyingness in all of us. (I also wanted to acknowledge the worth of this device, lest I seem hypocritical. Having become accustomed to its convenience, I wouldn’t want to give it up.) Finally, though this post isn’t a review of the BlackBerry or iPhone or any other smartphone, I’m hoping the proximity, in this sentence, of “review” to “BlackBerry” and “iPhone” will cause Google searches to direct people to my blog.

So, what is it about smartphones that gets people's heckles up? Let’s take an inventory.

Aesthetic issues

A phone doesn’t have to be very smart to be annoying. Obviously, simple musical ringtones can pollute any public transit or marketplace atmosphere. The common hands-free cell phone functionality makes it impossible to tell the real crazies from ordinary people having a heated argument with an unseen party. And I often see some joe walking down the sidewalk engrossed in conversation and—without realizing it—holding the clip-on microphone right near his mouth, without any idea what a total idiot he looks like. The devices themselves don’t look bad, but just add humans and you get some pretty unpleasant spectacles.

The fancier the technology, the worse this gets, as illustrated by the Bluetooth receiver that clips onto your ear. Are people really so lazy, or so often on the phone, that this thing could possibly make sense? The first time I saw a Bluetooth ear thingy, my unspoken reaction was “Aw, poor guy, I guess he’s mostly deaf, and needs the most powerful, clunky hearing aid on the market.” I was shocked to learn it was a non-essential accessory worn by choice.

Outside of the devices themselves, the hype their creators have generated becomes tedious. My seven-year-old asked me recently, out of the blue, “Daddy, which type of Blackberry do you prefer: yours, or the touch-screen kind?” Aghast, I asked where she’d heard of the touch-screen model. “You know, those bulletins along the highway,” she replied. Aren’t these devices popular enough without ubiquitous billboards advertising them?

Behavioral issues

Invariably, these modern electronic devices are equipped with useless little electronic games. Often I see people—upscale, well-dressed, presumably gainfully employed people—on the train playing Tetris or Solitaire on their PC, smartphone, or whatever. On the one hand, how they spend their time is really their own business. But on the other hand, I find this behavior offensive. I truly believe I could find totally useful ways to fill a 36-hour day, and I’d still go to bed every night lamenting the things I couldn’t find the time to do—and yet here these guys are, killing time as ruthlessly and pointlessly as Buffalo Bill and his ilk when they slaughtered all those buffalo, shooting at the innocent beasts from their train windows as they passed, out of sheer boredom.

At a trade show recently, a guy in one of the expo booths saw the corporate logo on my shirt and thought maybe I could help him with his BlackBerry. (I work in telecommunications.) He joked that if I could solve his problem, he would guarantee that I’d win the bike they were raffling off. I said I’d do my best. His complaint was that when he played Brickbreaker, a little game on the BlackBerry resembling the first Pong video game ever invented, he couldn’t get past a certain advanced level because the software would lock up. How could he get past this?

This was a real dilemma. On the one hand, I had no idea how to help (having only briefly examined Brickbreaker before dismissing it from my life forever). On the other hand, I didn’t want to seem unhelpful. Fortunately, in a college rhetoric class I had learned some useful tricks, such as “slipping between the horns of the dilemma.” In other words, I could offer this fellow an alternative solution: “Get a life!” Of course, being a nice guy who is representing his employer, I didn’t put it this way. I suggested instead that instead of Brickbreaker, he take advantage of another BlackBerry feature wherein you can rearrange the icons on your device’s desktop to your liking. It’s like a game—whenever you move one icon to where you want it, you disturb the ideal location of another icon, just like a sliding-number fifteen puzzle—except that when you’ve finished “playing” you’ve actually accomplished something. Plus, this application never crashes. (As you may have guessed, the guy didn’t like this suggestion.)

I think the strongest reaction against smartphone-using behavior comes from those who don’t appreciate the trajectory that these technological advances tend to take. In the beginning, the hi-tech device confers a rare advantage on the user—a lucky thing for him, without any effect on anybody else. (For example, the smartphone user can read his e-mail even when he’s not at his desk.) Then the new capability becomes something others can count on, which creates a new burden for the user. (Having a smartphone means being available to others on e-mail all the time.) Eventually, the technology becomes sufficiently widespread that everybody counts on everybody else having it, and those who refuse to adopt it cause actual resentment. If you don’t believe this, think about your reaction last time you tried to phone somebody and he didn’t have voice-mail or an answering machine. Or, imagine how annoyed you’d be if a friend or relative decided to renounce the telephone entirely.

Arrogance , showiness

Of course the main complaint people have with the early adopters of a slick and expensive new technology is the smugness these adopters tend to have. There’s a propensity among these people to go out of their way to use the new technology right in front of you, ignoring the fact that unless the technology is Botox or a padded bra, it isn’t doing the onlooker any good at all. It’s just an obnoxious display of one-upmanship—bad enough when the technology truly is impressive, and even worse when it’s not.

Somehow, the silent features of the smartphones make the user think he’s not only inaudible but invisible. Many cell phone users have, by now, figured out that they should step away from a public space to make (or field) a phone call, but the texters and e-mailers have evidently not. For example, a colleague from another branch, who invited me to lunch, spent most of the meal trying to buy something at an online auction. (I was not impressed.) Or consider our babysitter, who tuned out from our (albeit inconsequential) conversation to exchange some (doubtless utterly worthless) text messages. I’ve seen people in meetings go from letting their eyes flit momentarily to their smartphones to sharing their attention equally between the smartphone and me, to eventually forgetting they were in a meeting at all and peering with utter absorption into their smartphone screens. Miss Manners would see fit to have these people electrocuted.

Sometimes it’s not the use of the device but the mere display of it that is showy. I refer you again to the clip-on Bluetooth receiver. The second time I ever saw one of these was (coincidentally) at a Vegas trade show. A really cheesy guy, in a suit and tie and looking like Dilbert’s boss, was taking a parade lap of the convention hall with a hired bimbo on each arm, looking exceedingly proud of himself (as though anybody in attendance thought for a second he hadn’t just hired the bimbos like people used to hire a team of horses to pull their carriage). His glittering Bluetooth receiver was of a piece with his suit, his grin, and the spectacle of his bimbo parade. My colleague Brendan, as disgusted as I was, couldn’t take it and ran up to the guy. “Sir, sir!” Brendan cried out. “There’s something in your ear!”

Eye of the beholder?

The problem with diving right into this righteous indignation is that we’re prone to finding fault that isn’t really deserved. For example, what if I’m organizing the icons on my BlackBerry’s desktop—a perfectly reasonable thing to do—and you incorrectly assume I’m wasting my time on a dumb game? Or, consider my brother Geoff’s observation that people like to show off their fancy phones by setting them on the table when having a meal or coffee. For years I, too, thought of this as a needless display. But when I got my Blackberry I came to realize why people do this. It isn’t to show off the phone; it’s because cell phone buttons (especially on older, non-flip-top phones and modern smartphones) have a tendency to get pushed when you sit down with the device in your pocket. Once, as I sat down to lunch with a colleague, my Blackberry dialed the last number in memory, which turned out to be his. Imagine his surprise when the caller was—me!

Which brings me to an e-mail exchange I had with my brother Bryan. The first time I tried out the Blackberry camera feature, I discovered that I could e-mail photos directly from the phone. Of course I had to test this (and, yes, show off), so I sent a couple of photos of my daughters to my brother. I should have known I’d be in for it.

The Footer

Of course I knew about the footer, “Sent using Blackberry,” that would be attached to the e-mail to my brother, and I had a pretty good feeling that a) for good reason, and b) because he’s my older brother, Bryan would be commenting on that footer. I was not mistaken: click on the e-mail snapshot below to read his message.


(For the record, I don’t have cocktails before lunch, nor do I own or drive a luxury sedan.)

Bryan doesn’t explain exactly how my “Sent using BlackBerry” puts him at relative ease. I'm guessing it’s that he figures my use of this header is unintentional, that the footer is factory-configured, and all the footers from BlackBerry users are also unintentional, and thus people aren't as pompous as he’d feared. And I think he’s partially right. I propose that there are four main categories of smartphone user, which I will describe in descending order of annoyingness.

The first category comprises those who really are that proud of their smartphones, their connectedness, their with-it-ness, and their high-flying wi-fi ways. These people would go out of their way to put a “Sent using BlackBerry” footer on their messages even if it weren't pre-configured.

The second category covers the people who might be on the fence about whether or not to boast openly about their BlackBerryness, and would have to think hard about whether to set up the footer, but who don't have to decide because the footer is sent by default and they're perhaps glad the decision was made for them.

The third category consists of those who don't like the footer and wish it wasn't on there, but can't figure out how to remove it. (This process is not actually very straightforward, which is possibly by design.) These are the ones who, whenever e-mailing from their Blackberries, feel the “wince of remorse” my brother imagines.

The fourth category consists of those who don't like the footer and remove it. Of course, we have no way of knowing how many BlackBerry users fall into this category, because they're invisible. Their messages might as well have come from an Ethernet-connected PC.

Which brings me to my own case. As it happens, I don't fall into any of the four categories I set forth above. (Makes you wonder at their validity, eh?) To begin with, I was inclined to delete the footer. Before being issued a Blackberry of my own, when I got e-mails from Blackberries (or iPhones, which carry their own footer), I had always found the footer slightly boastful too, though thankfully I never said anything to anybody. (“You all without sin can cast the first stone....”) But on the verge of deleting my footer, I paused, reconsidered, and backed off. Why?

Well, for complicated reasons you surely wouldn’t care to hear about, I’m pretty sure my employer wants to promote Blackberry. That may be part of why they pay for my phone.  And so, as a good corporate citizen, who gets to enjoy the capabilities of this actually rather groovy device, I would feel pretty shabby removing the footer, or changing it to something like “Sent while driving.”

Evolution

I think the growing success of smartphones will eventually eliminate the ostentation of their users. We’ve seen this evolution before. Remember when phone answering machines were new? People would go out of their way to record funny, often elaborate outgoing messages. Many corporate types recorded a fresh outgoing message every day, announcing their general availability and such. But I don’t come across such custom messages anymore. (Do you?)

It also seems to me the cell phone culture has become more subdued. When cell phones were only in the hands of the elite, it seemed like those who had them talked a lot louder, and more often, in public. Whether through natural evolution or the efforts of businesses like restaurants prohibiting them, this activity has died down, even while the number of cell phone users has skyrocketed. I have read that the ringtone industry peaked in 2003 and has since died down quite a bit; apparently cell phone users eventually realized that custom ringtones just aren’t that cool after all.

Other technologies, too, have mellowed out or disappeared. Car alarms, once a must-have for anybody who thought his car (and/or car stereo) valuable, have gone from an epidemic to a blessed rarity. When e-mail first took hold, the number of forwarded jokes threatened to paralyze us all until people evidently tired of participating in the e-mail-tainment (though spam has stepped in to perpetuate our annoyance). Maybe in time the smartphone will evolve from a gee-whiz cutting-edge product into a basic, uncelebrated tool, and smartphone-originated e-mails won’t carry the “Sent from…” footers anymore. Indeed, I can foresee a world where the standard reaction to such a footer would be, “Well, duh!”