What spellcheck can’t catch

This afternoon in the office, several of us had quite a laugh over an email that was sent to members of our fellowship committee. It was a reminder that Monday is that day members of the department will take turns ringing the bell for the Salvation Army, across the street at Wal-Mart, and we want to serve bowls of hot chili to warm them up when they come back indoors. But one little typo sort of changed the meaning of this message:

Just sending a reminder that you had graciously volunteered to being chili Monday to warm our bell-ringers.

One of our chili chefs promptly informed the committee chair that she was not going to be chili and she certainly wasn’t going to warm anyone. He quickly sent out a correction, with the word BRING in capital letters.

I hadn’t even read the initial email myself. I was busy enjoying the appreciative response I had gotten to an email I had sent, in response to a manager’s notice about a contest to be held next week. Now, there really was nothing wrong with the email he sent – but it was just too tempting to read it a bit differently than he had intended. My response:

Regarding the IT Holiday Re-Work Contest, it says that “all functional teams are eligible.” What about the dysfunctional teams? If they’re not eligible, will there be anyone competing?

Anytime I start laughing over emails, I always remember two from a few years ago. First there was one from someone on another team about how our team could make use of Sharepoint. It’s a wonderful tool for sharing information, and she recommended we use it for “carnal knowledge.” I did a double-take, then asked my manager what she could possibly have meant. Eventually he suggested that she must have meant “tribal knowledge,” but I’ve never figured out what mistyping of tribal led the spellchecker to “correct” it to carnal.

Not long after that, my own manager sent an email out after some incident that had made extra work for some people. He apologized for any incontinence he had caused. I’ve heard since of the same error made elsewhere – it’s not too hard to see how spellcheck does that one. But I still smile every time I think of it.

What if Santa’s workshop were run by computers?

Every year there are internet posts regarding the physics of delivering toys to a few hundred million children in one night. But I don’t recall seeing one on the logistical complexity of ordering, manufacturing, packaging, and preparing all those toys for shipment. Having worked in manufacturing companies for over twenty years, I have some idea of the difficulty involved.

Even using what appear to be the relatively conservative figures I have seen, of only 15% of the world’s population of children celebrating Christmas, and only allowing one toy per child, by my calcuations that still requires manufacturing over 1 million toys every day (not counting Christmas, which we assume is a day off for the elves). If they run 24/7 (either working in shifts, or else elves don’t need to sleep), that still means over forty thousand toys an hour, or about 700 every minute.

Now, those elves may be very good at making toys, and perhaps they can keep up that run rate all year long. But where do they store all those toys? How do they keep track of how many fire engines and dolls and skateboards and Lego sets they have made so far? How do they ensure a steady supply of plastic, paint, wheels, and – for today’s electronic toys – resistors, memory chips, LEDs, and so forth?

Manufacturing companies have been struggling with these issues for decades. Raw and finished goods inventories, once tracked on paper (one of my first jobs was in purchasing, where every part had a large index card, even though the actual purchase orders were entered in the computer), are now computerized. Keeping that computer inventory accurate is quite a challenge. But that’s nothing compared to the challenge of keeping track of what you need to order, when, and how much.

When fingers do the reading

Monday evening, our Webelos den went to the library to work on earning their Communicator pin. After going over how to find books and how to take good care of them, the children’s librarian brought out what looked like a very large photo album. This was a Braille copy of the Bible, she explained, and she gave the boys a chance to feel the pages.

My parents had friends who were blind, so I was familiar with the look and feel of Braille materials from an early age. (Not that I ever learned to read them.) It came as somewhat of a surprise, Monday, to realize that it has been so long since I have seen someone actually using Braille that it was probably something completely new to these fourth grade boys.

The librarian added that no one was using the Braille books anymore, so they had been removed from the library’s holdings. She saved the Braille Bible herself, because it seemed a shame to lose something so wonderful. Today people use recorded books instead, she explained.

When I was growing up, there were recorded books, but they weren’t widely available. When my grandfather had cataract surgery, he had patches over his eyes while he recovered, and we took turns staying with him and helping him out while he was unable to see. To pass the time, he listened to some recorded books, which were loaned out by the organization that made them available to blind people.

For the challenge of it

In a recent post I quoted mountaineer George Mallory’s famous line about why he climbed mountains: “Because it’s there.” The challenge drew him irresistibly, even to his death atop Mount Everest. While I like hiking, I’ve never been drawn to dangerous climbs. But I do respond to the challenge of a good puzzle.

My sons, especially my younger son Al, do not seem to feel the same way about challenges. I am annoyed when he helps me with a puzzle I’m working on, though I try to express appreciation because I know he means to be helpful. I do not want help, I want to solve it on my own. Some of that may be pride, but it is also because it is the challenge itself that appeals to me, and to the extent that hints reduce the difficulty of solving it, they reduce my pleasure in finding the solution.

Over the years I’ve noticed that some kinds of challenges appeal to me more than others. At one time, the idea of fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzles appealed to me. One sort has no picture, just a solid color, and only the shape of the pieces shows how to put it together. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is The World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle, where every piece is exactly the same shape, and only the picture provides the solution - plus the puzzle is double-sided, with the same picture on both sides! But by the time I had money of my own to purchase such puzzles, I found I was no longer interested.

I enjoy difficult crossword puzzles, but if I spend an hour on a puzzle and have only come up with a few words, not enough to help me get any more, the puzzle is simply too hard for me. I will try even longer on an acrostic, but eventually I will give up on those also if too many clues are too obscure for me to come up with even a decent guess. I can do “cross-sums” puzzles, but I find that too often, I discover three quarters of the way through that I must have made some error in logic early on, and the only way to undo it is to start completely over. So I rarely start them at all.

One kind of puzzle I enjoy is computer programming, but never purely for the sake of the challenge itself. I like doing programming that provides a useful solution to a problem, or an entertaining game to play. I work at the application level, meaning the level where the program interacts with the user, rather than at the systems level where the program simply provides a platform for other developers to write their programs.

One kind of computer puzzle I have never found an interest in is hacking. The term hacker is often used in a pejorative sense, because some hackers have used their ability to alter hijack code for malicious purposes. But at root, hacking is simply figuring out the secrets that are coded into computers and not intended for anyone but the people who put them there to know. It’s not a challenge that appeals to me, but it has a very strong appeal to many people – at least to many young men (estimates of hacker demographics indicate that about 90% are male and median age is 25).

Happily behind the times

I am behind the times. I still think email is the way to communicate with people I don’t see in person. I get my news from the internet, but I don’t Twitter, and I rarely log on to facebook. I spend a good deal of time on the computer, both at home and at work, but most of the time I’m reading, not participating in communcation with other people.

I still think a two-hour response time to an email is pretty good (unless an urgent task at work is waiting for the answer). If I want a faster answer, I use a very old-fashioned means of communication. I get up from my desk and walk to the desk of the person I want to talk to (the requests I process come from people in the same building). I have Office Communicator available to me, but I have never once signed on.

According to an article in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal (technology does let me get ahead on some things), “email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone.” It’s true that my internet is always on, because we have cable internet, but I’m certainly not always on the internet. I do carry a mobile phone, but that’s mostly so my husband can always call me. (It’s also handy to have a calculator/stopwatch/alarm clock in my pocket).

I don’t generally need a quicker response than I can get from email. I have little interest in when friends leave for work or get home or go to bed, or some of the other trivial details that get posted on facebook. It is a handy place to see their vacation photos – especially because I can take a quick look and skip the rest if I’m not really interested. I found a couple classmates from high school on facebook – but I have ignored a few friend requests because I don’t really know the people, even if they go to the same church or went to the same college.

The article points out some of the downsides to the communication streams enable by services such as facebook and twitter. There is too much information, and it’s hard to filter out the important from the unimportant. Because you are posting something that may be read by 500 “friends” who are more acquaintance than real friends, you don’t share things you might with real friends. More of your life is on display for huge numbers of other people to find than you may really intend.

Those are some of the reasons I choose to stay behind the times. I only log on to facebook when I want to play Farkle. I rarely post anything on my wall. (After all, this blog is where I put the thoughts that I want to share with the people who are interested enough to read them.) I read blogs of people/groups whose thoughts interest me – even if blogs are also considered passé now.

I don’t dislike technology. But I dislike noise. And the noise level seems pretty high on these new communications streams.

The science (and fiction) of H.G. Wells

I’ve enjoyed reading science fiction since I was in about fourth grade. As an adult, I’ve enjoyed even more reading about where science fiction gets it wrong, and where it gets it right. I have two books discussing the science in Star Trek (one on physics, the other on biology), and we enjoyed watching a TV special a few years ago on the science of Stargate SG-1.

Science fiction is often a mix of inventions which remain far in the future (robots that are barely distinguishable from humans, flying cars) and others that have now been far outstripped by reality (think of the size of the modules that had to be removed from HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, compared to the size of memory and storage modules actually used in this century). I occasionally work on one of my own science fiction story ideas, but then I start wondering how ridiculous some of my ideas might seem within only a decade or two.

One comparison I hadn’t read before is between the ideas of H. G. Wells’ novels and science as we know it today. I have read a few of his books, but had only a vague notion of when he lived. He was born 143 years ago today, I learned from nationalgeographic.com, and pretty much defined the genre of science fiction with his literary output.

Did you know the U.S. military now has a heat-ray gun? It doesn’t kill, or even cause physical harm, but it does produce a burning sensation and can be used to help disperse crowds. Wells envisioned automatic sliding doors, but he got the direction of the movement wrong (he had the door moving up into the ceiling instead of sideways into the walls).

It may not have taken a visionary to predict attempts to combine features of different animals, though Wells could not have imagined the mechanics of genetic engineering. People have been cross-breeding animals and plants for ages, within the limits of their technological abilities. Going beyond those limits waited only on the necessary scientific discoveries.

Time travel remains one of the most intriguing (to me) plot enablers in science fiction. The linked article quotes a physics professor who states that time travel has not actually been proven impossible, contrary to what many physicists claim. Since most time travel stories I have read deal with the problems created by time travel, rather than the opportunities such travel would create, I rather hope that the ”many physicists” are correct.

Bidding, bidding… sold!

I first discovered ebay well over a decade ago, when it was still relatively unknown. The clerk at a store had told me about it when I mentioned my husband’s interest in collectible chess sets. It was years before I actually made my first ebay purchase, but it was fun just to browse through the listings of all sorts of unusual items. Kind of like a giant flea market, but better organized so you could just look at the interesting stuff.

It was a few years more before we starting thinking about selling things on ebay ourselves. We’ve tried garage sales, before each big interstate move (from NJ to MI in 1998 and from MI to IL in 2004), and had very little success. Selling items on ebay would save us having to carry everything outside, only to have to carry most of it back in when it didn’t sell. It wouldn’t require sitting by the merchandise hour after hour, and it would attract people who actually had an interest in things we were selling instead of those who just happened to be in the neighborhood.

But it also required learning how to do it. We read through a set of instructions, and it looked doable but still daunting. We didn’t decide not to do it, but we didn’t decide to do it either, and the instructions vanished in the pile of paper and other junk that our desk attracts the way a garbage can attracts flies. The idea resurfaced during a period of unemployment, stalled in the complexities of categorizing and valuing the items to be sold, and was again swallowed in the sea of papers when a job offer alleviated the immediate need.

This summer, with the economy as a whole as depressed as our personal finances, determination overcame the barriers to becoming an ebay seller. This was helped significantly by a speech given in Toastmasters by a co-worker who has a store on ebay, and who described the entire process of getting started in a simple step-by-step Powerpoint presentation. Five days ago, I finally succeeded in listing my first two items.

For the past few days, I watched somewhat anxiously to see the first signs that anyone was even looking at my listings. Finally one showed that two people were watching it, and the next day the other one also. This evening (with only a few hours left in the auction), I finally saw bidding activity. Many buyers – as I have learned to do myself – waiting until near the end of the auction to place any bids.

A few minutes ago the auctions both ended, and I saw with pleasure that both items sold. The dollar amounts are small, but the satisfaction is significant. It really does work, and it’s a lot more efficient than setting up shop in the yard or the driveway. Soon I’ll have money coming into my bank account (via paypal), and then I will happily head to the post office to mail the items.

And at the next Toastmasters meeting, I’ll have to thank my co-worker for her part in getting me started.

Guide for the Perpetually loSt

This morning we visited the local Presbyterian Church, where a group of young people was leading the service, telling about their recent mission trip. One of their adult leaders told how grateful she was for Gladys, who kept her from getting lost as they went to their work assignments. I assumed Gladys was a local resident, who knew the roads well and rode with the group. No, Gladys turned out to be the new GPS system in the woman’s van.

I’ve been in a co-worker’s vehicle that was equipped with GPS, but I haven’t actually seen – or rather heard – it in action. My husband, who admits to being directionally challenged, would much appreciate such a navigational assistant. Next time we take a road trip, we will probably avail ourselves of the service provided by our wireless phone provider, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

I’ve heard about GPS for years, and had some idea of the technology behind it, but really never gave it much thought until Al and I explored the GPS exhibit at the Putnam Museum yesterday. The exhibit consists of a maze, with information along the way on GPS technology, plus hidden treasures to find and puzzles to solve.

As Al was more interested in finding treasures and getting through the maze than reading all the information along the way (plus we had a movie to get to – see yesterday’s post), I only picked up some of it myself. But I learned that, besides being used by travelers prone to getting lost, GPS is also used by search and rescue teams, farmers, and by the global geocaching community.

Extreme sports: yo-yoing?

I remember having a yellow yo-yo as a child. It was a decent quality yo-yo, probably a Duncan, but not as expensive or flashy as some of the more expensive Duncan models. I practiced a long time to be able to get the yo-yo to go up and down the way it was supposed to.

It was one of those important childhood skills, along with whistling and blowing bubbles in Bazooka bubble gum. I also tried to learn to do a cartwheel but never succeeded. I admit I didn’t try quite as hard at that one, because I hated being upside down.

I never tried to learn any yo-yo tricks, though. I had heard of terms like “walk the dog” but I had no idea what it would look like (I still don’t). Like cat’s cradle, it seemed a skill that required a level of concentration and practice that I had no inclination to give it.

Today’s yo-yo tricks require a lot more than just concentration and practice. My old yellow yo-yo, even if I still had it, would be totally inadequate today. New materials and new designs have produced high tech yo-yos that do tricks never imagined a generation ago, or even a decade ago.

They also require a higher level of physical involvement, including a tolerance for physical pain. I may have occasionally gotten a bruise from hitting myself with my yo-yo – I get bruises from hitting myself on furniture, doorways, cars, etc. – why not yo-yos? But no scars from string marks, no cuts on my face, certainly no ruined veins or chipped teeth.

If your last experience with a yo-yo was as long ago as mine, you may be wondering how playing with a yo-yo could produce those kinds of injuries. Take a look at this article from the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal, and find out how this old-time hobby has turned into an extreme sport in the new century.

End of an era

I vaguely remember, sometime back in the Dark Ages, using an online service called CompuServe. I had completely forgotten it until I read today that they just shut down after thirty years of service. Apparently I’m not the only one who thought it had died years ago.

Thirty years ago my only exposure to a computer had been in an astronomy class at Talcott Mountain Science Center in 1975. They had a time-sharing arrangement giving access to a mainframe (for all I know, that connection might have been managed by Compu-Serv Network, which had been formed in 1969 to provide computer time-share services), and getting “online” involved putting a phone handset in an acoustic coupler. There was no screen; input and output both appeared on the printer. (I’m pretty sure it was not dot matrix, as the letters didn’t always line up – perhaps it was a teleprinter.)

I suppose we must have used this technology for astronomy, but I only remember playing a moon landing game (I always crashed, either from coming in too fast, or using up all my fuel with the reverse thrusters, and then crashing) and a game called BAGEL that is similar in concept to Mastermind. Sometimes the computer was also used to print out banners – do you remember those text-based banners that were popular in the 70’s? I don’t know whether the technology was cutting edge, but it was daunting enough to me that I let the tech-savvy boys (I was the only girl in the class) do most of it.

The situation was very different in 1989, the year CompuServe became the first online service provider to offer some limited Internet connectivity. I had a certificate in computer programming from a local community college, and I worked for a small manufacturing company where I was the computer expert. Most of what I did would be categorized as computer operations and help desk, but I also had access to the company’s only modem, which I used to transfer the biweekly payroll to ADP.