A Father’s Day Poem

Introduction

This is a poem I wrote for my father, but it could apply to many a father—which is more than I can say for all those stupid Father’s Day cards featuring clichés like the hammock, the necktie, the golf clubs, or the fishing gear. Those tropes seem outdated and twee. If the greeting card industrial complex is trying to guess accurately about fathers’ behaviors they should show a dad in a dingy t-shirt in a La-Z-Boy armchair watching sports on TV.

My dad was the rare kind who didn’t watch any sports. But he also didn’t lie in a hammock, wear a necktie, play golf, or fish. The only card I ever found that would have been totally appropriate is this one, which I could never bring myself to actually send:

So I’d pick some generic nature-themed card, but that only solved half the problem, the other half being what to write inside. After all, beyond “Happy Father’s Day,” what more is there to say? In my case, I couldn’t say “You were always there for me” or “Best Dad ever!” without seeming a bit disingenuous. So that’s how this poem came to be: it nicely solved the blank card problem. (In my case perhaps I had the sneaky ulterior motive of rubbing my dad’s nose in my choice of English as a major, when he was a passionate STEM proponent well ahead of all the Johnny-come-lately STEM-pushers who are terrorizing the current crop of teenagers.)

I guess you’re free to steal this poem for your own card. But if you do, and your dad doesn’t know you to be a competent poet, he’ll surely see right through your plagiarism. And if you are a competent poet, well, write your own ode!

The Poem

To Dad - June 19, 2016

A father, residing in Boulder

Was young once, and then he got older.                2

He looks quite distinguished

And though he’s no linguist                                     4

He knows the right way to say “solder.”

This father, though lacking a daughter,                6

Was odd once, and maybe got odder.

He’s quite good with language—                            8

Can easily manage

To get the right rhyme out of “solder.”                10

Footnotes & Commentary

Title

I know, “To Dad” seems really generic but you have to remember “Dad” in this context is a proper noun so this is actually very personal and special. We fathers know this viscerally. Particularly when my kids were younger, when I was in a crowd of people and would hear a young girl yell, “Dad!” I would look around in a panic for a second before realizing some unrelated kid needed her dad.

Line 1 – a father

Given all the stuff I just said about “Dad” being personal, now I go off and start the poem with “A father”? Like, just any father? Of course I knew this would be jarring, but good poetry is supposed to be. If I wanted treacle, I’d go buy a Hallmark card. And no harm done: I knew by the time my dad got to the end of the line he’d realize this was a limerick, and I was just following the convention (e.g., “There once was a man from Nantucket”).

Line 2 – was young once … got older

This is an allusion to the Simon & Garfunkel song “The Boxer”—the extended version they performed at their concert in Central Park:

Now the years are rolling by me,

They are rockin’ evenly.

I am older than I once was

But younger than I’ll be.

That’s not unusual.

Would my dad catch this reference? Nope. He didn’t listen to much music. He had some records but they were all even older than Simon & Garfunkel. He never played the radio unless it was the classical station, as background music. Missed allusion aside, I figured my dad would enjoy knowing that somebody remembered the fact of his once being young. (My own kids won’t shut up about how old I am.)

Line 3 – looks quite distinguished

I kind of had to say something nice after reminding my dad how old he was (even though he prided himself on his agedness, his favorite self-referential term being “geezer”). Besides, he was distinguished and he knew it, so this was a compliment that wouldn’t come off as disingenuous.

Pretty respectable looking chap, eh? I must admit that I feel a bit odd forming your opinion based on such an old photo of him … I guess I’m sensitive to the rampant, unbridled deception taking place all over Instagram and other self-celebration platforms with people posting ideally unrepresentative photos. So here’s another shot of my dad, taken mere months before I wrote this poem.

If you look closely there’s a hard set to his mouth, and a strain shows around his eyes, and the eyes themselves are looking a bit blank and distant. That’s because when this photo was snapped, my dad already knew that he had cancer and likely wouldn’t be long for this world. Still, I think he was a very handsome guy well into old age (or as he’d put it “geezerdom”).

Line 4 – no linguist

This was perhaps a bit harsh, because even though my dad was a scientist and engineer through-and-through, he prided himself on having perfect grammar. Still, there’s no shame in not being a linguist. In fact, if I had become a professional linguist, my dad probably would have been a bit disappointed, even if I rose through the ranks and had a team of linguists working under me.

Line 5 – the right way to say solder

This line is a trap! Instinctively, the reader—or at least an astute reader like my dad—would be expecting the last word of the line to rhyme with “Boulder” and “older” in keeping with the limerick form, and then this word would look like it would rhyme, but of course it doesn’t. My dad would know the proper pronunciation, being the kind of guy who loved soldering things. He would have been really honored had I also learned how to solder. (If I could have found a Father’s Day card with a soldering iron on it, I’d have bought it in a heartbeat.)

So at this point in reading the poem my dad had to be perplexed. Surely, he’d muse, his own son couldn’t think “solder” rhymes with “older”—could he? Dad would mull this over for a bit. My level of intelligence wasn’t something he was totally confident about. He knew full well I wasn’t as smart as he was (his IQ having been measured at 180, with this result unwisely disclosed to him). A long-standing and still unresolved family argument concerns whether, back in 1983, my dad did or did not say to me at the dinner table, “You’re not very bright, are you.” (For the record, I don’t believe he actually said this to me, but the fact that we could imagine it does say something.)

It’s not like my dad considered me a dumbass—after all, I did manage to get a degree from his own alma mater—but to somebody as smart as he, everyone must have seemed a little dense. So I imagine he wondered for a moment if I’d just had the pronunciation wrong, before thinking, “Wait—he’s specifically talking about the right way to pronounce this word, so of course he knows.”

My dad’s relief would quickly pass, though, because until he fully appreciated the joke, he would be a bit prickled by my audacity in deliberately spurning the rhyme scheme of the limerick form by using a non-rhyming word here. This might strike you as an unfair accusation of extreme pedanticism, but I assure you this is a realistic consideration. For my dad, using “real” as an adverb was tantamount to cussing. He once challenged me about using the phrase “that’s me” on this blog because “that’s I” is, strictly speaking, the correct grammar. Also, he was once scandalized because, when emailing a large group where all the recipients were blind-copied, for the main “To” address I used “nobody@nowhere.com” which obviously isn’t legit. My dad took me to task for this, and when I replied that this was a victimless crime, he drew my attention to the mail servers on the Internet that would waste valuable computing cycles searching in vain for that address. O, the humanity!

So yeah, that line ending in “solder” was me having a bit of illicit fun, being a literary bad boy, if you will.

Line 6 – lacking a daughter

This phrase is clearly the weakest part of the poem. You could quite reasonably accuse me of using the word “daughter” just because it rhymes with “odder” on the next line. In that sense, I’ve stooped to the level of that abysmal Hall & Oates song, “Your kiss is on my list.” (Have you ever thought about that? This guy makes a list: “Get up, shower, make coffee, empty the cat box, kiss Marcia, drop off dry cleaning…”)

The better line would be: “This dad, though not liable to dodder.” This would work very nicely with the ageing theme I’d already developed, and there’s a nice alliteration with the Ds in “dad” and “dodder.” But of course it wouldn’t be very nice, even though I’m technically saying he doesn’t dodder. We English majors love to ponder how you can’t say something without also implying its opposite, and this is a great example. (If you’re looking for another, consider how you’d feel if the big boss started his or her next staff meeting by saying, “Okay, I want to be clear here: nobody is talking about layoffs!”)

Meanwhile, I think it’s pretty much impossible to use the word “dodder” without summoning the phrase “doddering old fool.” So even if my dad was reassured that I’m clearly stating he doesn’t dodder, that phrase would be lurking nearby, casting a shadow over his poem-reading experience. I just couldn’t do that to the guy … I mean, the card and poem are supposed to be a tribute, right?

It also happens to be that “lacking a daughter” was totally apropos, and in my dad’s case the most powerful phrase in the whole poem. Family legend has it that he always wanted a daughter. My mom refutes this, but I think she’s just trying to keep me from feeling like the very first thing I did upon being born was to disappoint my father. I like to joke that my parents were hoping so hard for a girl, they chose a girl’s name, and when I ended up a boy, they saddled me with it anyway.

Line 7 – odd  … odder

Was this line mean-spirited? I’d say it was pushing the edge of the envelope. I owed that to myself after decades of pathetically obsequious letters to my father, trying to win his approval. I figured if I was being nice enough now to write him a poem, I could playfully tweak him a bit at the same time, to shore up my own self respect. (And you thought this was a simple limerick!)

All this being said, “odd” and “odder” wouldn’t have particularly irked my dad because he had to know he was odd. He didn’t exactly strive to fit in, and sometimes wore his eccentricity on his sleeve. For example, he ditched the hubcaps on his (already odd) Scion XB and painted the rims bright blue. During his last years he wore, almost exclusively, this pair of bright cranberry-relish colored trousers that he liked to boast were significantly discounted at L.L. Bean due to their unpopular color.

Did Dad get odder over time? Absolutely. He eschewed the normal methods of running a household; for example, he would board up his windows during winter with custom-cut forms of silver-surfaced Styrofoam, to improve insulation, and he took to storing his underwear and undershirts in a filing cabinet instead of a standard dresser. (What benefit he saw in that is beyond me.)

Would having a daughter have kept my dad from becoming odder? Possibly. My brothers and I didn’t tend to challenge our dad, because he didn’t seem comfortable with that kind of thing. Where males were concerned he was pretty competitive, in a way he wasn’t with females. A daughter would have had an easier rapport with him and could probably have said, “Lose the berry-colored pants, dude! You look like a doddering old fool!”

Line 8 – quite good with language

Even if my dad wouldn’t mind being called odd, I knew I was close to the line so a bit of praise couldn’t hurt. Besides, it’s true: he was very good with language. When I hear the rampant errors committed by modern engineer-types (e.g., “between you and I”), I tend to cringe; after all, my dad proved that respect for language and for STEM aren’t mutually exclusive.

Line 10 – get the right rhyme

This line deliberately conflates the reader with the poet, as though my dad himself could have written this poem. I think with the right motivation and some effort, he could have. As evidence, I draw your attention to a couplet he casually tossed off at the dinner table one night when protesting my mom’s choice of side vegetable:

It takes more than a muscled lout

To make me eat a Brussels sprout.

It occurs to me (only now, alas) that it would have been fun to challenge my dad to try his hand at a limerick or a sonnet. So you know what? I’m going to do some poetry with my mom and my brothers the next time I see them.

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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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