Headline: "Google Transforms Into Hal"

The following dyslectic paragraph appeared in my e-mail today:

“I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt.”

I don’t know what kind of stroke results in the above, but I hope it doesn’t happen to me. I’ve noticed that my typing is getting a little worse, especially when I’m tired. I find myself occasionally transposing the two center letters in a four letter wrod, but I don’t think I ahve eevr tolltay scrweed up a logner wrod like smoe of toshe abvoe.

Thankfully my mind hasn’t devolved to that point yet, although it does appear to be heading that way. I suppose if I wanted to keep track of the slow demise of brain cells I could turn off “spell check as you type” and just activate it at the end of a page. That way I could keep tabs on how many words I misspell and gauge my mental acuity on a weekly basis. Forget it. Too much self awareness can be a bad thing.

You have to admit, it is amazing how the brain adapts – how you can actually read that first paragraph without that much trouble. The human brain is still an awesome bit of engineering any way you look at it. It’s also not likely to be upstaged anytime soon; certainly not by a pitiful little appliance like the one I’m typing on.

So, I’m thinking, what is the state of computing power today? Aren’t we getting close to duplicating the power of a human mind in silicon? No? What if you took the entire internet of connected computers and they could somehow communicate with each other independent of their human operators? Wouldn’t that be something if it didn’t self-destruct? You could even call it Hal. Maybe then you would have an entity that approaches the computing power and intrepretive genius of the homo-sapien brain.

Yesterday I happened upon a blog post that explained very clearly how to put your pants on. I found this both humorous and informative. If such a simple explanation for virtually everything that we need to do on a daily basis were available somewhere on the internet, then heck, Hal could conceivably rule the world!

You would just need some sort of incredible indexing system and probably some way to decide what is worthwhile and what is crap. That last bit is going to be the hardest, given the preponderance of crap out there.

No dobut Golgoe has sotimenhg in the wroks - of cruose wtih a mroe clveer nmae tahn Hal.

White Knights Riding Trojan Horses

I guess I don’t get an overwhelming amount of junk mail by today’s standards, certainly not as much as my wife does. I think it might be her affinity for online shopping since many of these places tend to “share” e-mail addresses with their “business partners” (i.e. trade their list through a broker).

But I do get a certain amount of unsolicited garbage, as do most people. One offers to sell me Microsoft Office for $69 or Photoshop for $99, which is obviously bogus – not just from the unprofessional appearance of the e-mail, but also because I traced the URL to somewhere in Russia. Others pitch their porn websites or offer to sell Viagra and other such drugs without a prescription.

I hate to think how many people fall for these scams, sending in their money and never hearing from the scammer again. Even if they’re willing to admit to some consumer advocate or government agency that they got scammed trying to buy illegal software or drugs, what do you think is going to happen? Nothing. They will just get their name and e-mail address put on another list. That money is gone.

And then there are all those online scam businesses that sell regular stuff – things that you need like batteries or water filters or office supplies. There are plenty of those who have put together a very professional website with absolutely no intention of shipping anything. They just collect orders for a while and then take down the site and put up another one. When I think about all the money that is stolen this way, it makes me want to reach through the internet pipeline and grab those crooks by the throat.

So I started to think, why isn’t there a way to do just that, figuratively. While there are more than enough twisted minds willing to spend a great deal of effort to construct viruses that create havoc just for the fun of it, aren’t there also some people with the same genius directed towards a more socially beneficial pursuit?

I’d be willing to pay good money for a program that intercepts scam e-mails and replies with a Trojan Horse that takes down the website. If not that, then something that creates havoc with the ISP who facilitates their mass e-mailing enterprise.

Yes I know, you’re going to say that if it were legal to do that, then all sorts of online wars would break out between legitimate businesses who are unscrupulously competitive. That’s probably true unfortunately. But I still think it is an idea worth considering. I bought a $25 program for my wife’s computer that filters out spam at the local level, according to her judgment, not someone at Earthlink or Google. It seems to work pretty well, diverting stuff to the “suspected spam” folder that she has previously identified as such. When something goes in there that she wants to read, she tags it as “good” and it is left alone thereafter.

I don’t necessarily want to encourage White Knight vigilantes on the internet like the sort of folks patrolling the Arizona border this month, but I wouldn’t shed a tear if some “anti-bacterial” software accidentally got loose on the internet and started to eat away at scammers and phishers around the globe.

If you also have some thoughts on what the Engineers and Inventors of the world should be working on, check out my other project: Inspiration 2025.

Mental Illness?

It’s always sad to see some animated person standing on a street corner waving and hollering to passing cars. You instantly recognize them as having some sort of mental handicap that has gone untreated, a reminder of the thousands of the people in this world who are in serious need of psychological help but cannot afford it.

But these days, this condition seems to be infecting people in all walks of life, not just the poor and homeless. Last week I witnessed a well-dressed woman walking through our local shopping mall alone, gesturing and talking loudly to no one in particular. Then yesterday while in line at Starbucks, a nice looking young man in front of me was carrying on an entire conversation with his imaginary friend. He even interrupted his conversation to order his coffee, and then continued on with it as he waited for them to prepare it. It was fascinating that this guy could switch so easily between two worlds, able to interact with the Starbucks clerk very appropriately, and then immediately switching back into his fantasy world to resume his conversation with himself.

Of course you know what happened next, he turned around revealing alien Bluetooth hardware growing out of his left ear. Some would say that this makes the whole thing ok, since he was actually talking to his girlfriend on his cellphone and not his inner demons. But is it really ok?

If everyone wore this Borg prosthesis on the side of their faces, how unnerving would that be? Lets say you’re talking to a friend and all of a sudden they wave you off and start a conversation with someone a hundred miles away. No ringing cellphone, nothing; he just stops listening to you. How rude is that?

It's akin to the situation where you’re paying for something at a store when the phone rings and the clerk spends several minutes answering the caller’s question instead of finishing with your transaction. Why does the person on the phone get to jump to the front of the line? Why should a cellphone conversation take priority over a real-life face-to-face conversation? Or maybe you’re sitting in the car talking and you realize that your friend hasn’t been listening to a word you’ve been saying; he’s been checking his voice mail!

Cellphones can be a wonderful adjunct to our daily lives, but common courtesy seems to have been lost in the process. People need to be reminded that a ringing telephone is not a national emergency and that the fact that they have been called in the middle of lunch doesn’t necessarily make them important. As these Bluetooth headsets get smaller and smaller to the point where they become nearly invisible, a whole new social protocol will need to be developed; in fact it’s overdue.

As wireless technology insinuates itself into every aspect of our lives, the person standing outside alone talking and gesturing into space is going to become a common sight, causing no one to notice. This doesn’t bode well for the poor guy yelling on the street corner who has no cellphone but thinks he does.
How is he going to get noticed?

Finger Condoms

Are your fingerprints on file somewhere? The answer is yes if you’ve been in the military, ever been arrested, or even recently gotten a driver’s license or had a document notarized. Chances are, in each of these situations they used ink on paper.

Not for long though. Indications are that electronic fingerprint readers are going to be everywhere soon. Already being built into laptops and security panels, these little devices read your fingerprint and can save you from entering a pin #, or carrying an ID card around your neck. For higher security situations, you may have to use a combination of these things, but for securing your laptop, most people will set it up with just one swipe of the finger to log in.

But how secure is this really? Ignoring the bizarre extreme where someone mugs you and chops off your finger to access your laptop (this actually happens - not just in mystery novels), what about someone stealing your fingerprint? Since you can get instructions for making bombs on the internet, there is probably already a website where you can learn how to take a latent fingerprint and process it into an artificial finger to use on security scanners.

Optical readers just require you to press your finger onto the pad and a matrix of sensors reads the print. Obviously this is not very secure since you leave your finger print right there on the reader for someone to lift. Consequently, these are already being replaced by readers that require you to sweep your finger sideways across a pad - apparently less susceptible to collecting prints on the surface.

If these readers really take off, and I believe they will, what are the social implications? Will we all get hyper-aware of leaving finger prints on things in public, carrying “wipe-down” rags with us or wearing finger cots? For those who don’t know this term, finger cots are used mostly by doctors and nurses for exam purposes (no need to go into more detail). They cover a single finger, come in different sizes and look like tiny condoms, which is undoubtedly what they will be called if people start wearing them.

Adults will seek ones that match their skin color, maybe with some new material that breathes. Teens will go the opposite route paying extra for brightly colored finger condoms. Groups will define themselves by finger color. Some will program their laptops to read their middle finger so they can offer up a fluorescent middle finger gesture when the situation calls for it. A whole new lexicon of gestures will emerge, maybe a whole new sign language based on a complex system of hand signals and colors.

Make it stop!!

How Long Before There is One Dominant Language?

Shortly after Al Gore invented the “information highway” regular people started to find ways to use it. The internet or “world wide web” became a frequent subject of conjecture with people making all sorts of predictions as to it’s potential influence, both good and evil. But notice that recently we don’t seem to hear much about it anymore, at least in general terms. Instead of discussions about “The Net” and how revolutionary it is, news articles now focus on specific uses of the internet, especially the grass-roots uses such as blogs.

More and more people are discovering the experience of publishing their thoughts and ideas to the world – for free! Even when you don’t know if anyone is listening, there is something strangely compelling about publishing your ideas in an open forum. If you’ve never seen your name in a newspaper, it’s like exposing a part of yourself to strangers around the globe.

Picture a housewife named Grace peering out her sitting room window onto a snow covered field. Nothing is moving outside, the only sound comes from the wind whispering through the trees. She smiles as she turns around, sits down at her computer and starts writing down her thoughts on this cold March morning. When Grace is finished with her half-page, she hits publish and ten seconds later the entire world can read what it feels like to be a widow on a farm in North Dakota.

To see life through Grace’s eyes you don’t have to buy a book, or make a trip to the library or buy a subscription to a writer’s anthology magazine; you just have to discover it online. If Grace is persistent, and publishes a little bit of her soul every week, and if her story is engaging, then people will eventually find it. Someone will stumble upon Grace’s lonely story and e-mail his friend. That friend may post the link on her own blog or website. It may take six months or a year, but those voices that are worth hearing will be heard.

All of a sudden, anyone like Grace with the knack for expressing ideas and emotions that cause people to take notice can be a published writer. Everyone has an inner voice, and now that voice can be heard around the world. As much as the publishing industry is starting to lose sleep about all this, so is the movie industry. When a movie like “Tarnation” that cost a few hundred dollars to create can get rave reviews at Sundance and Cannes, it does not bode well for those who feel they need to spend $100 million to create a work of art. This technological empowerment will change the world faster than anyone can imagine, and it will force cultural change that countries will be powerless to stop.

Right now, Mandarin Chinese is a first language for about 14% of the world’s population, followed by Hindi at 6% and English at 5% (ref: Wiki). Because of the extensive reach of the British Empire, and more recently the economic influence of the U.S. economy, English is by far the most learned second language. As internet access gets cheaper to the point where it is essentially free, and works it’s way into the farthest reaches of the globe, how long will it take for one language to totally dominate around the world?

What language will that be?