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The Watch
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Metacult: So, Pater, I was thinking--wait a minute; I hear someone scratching at the door.
Janra: Hi, Vespucci. How are you?
Vespucci: Doing well. Take a seat.
Janra: Where?
Vespucci: Anywhere.
Janra: Anywhere?
Vespucci: Anywhere...
Off! Off! Get off my lap! Only my wife is allowed to sit there. You know that. Anyways, the Radical Gadgets catalogue came in today...
Janra: By the way, I phoned the company today. I think I can get some World War II vintage mechanical--
Vespucci: Don't even think about it. If you--
Pater: Easy, brothers. As you were saying?
Vespucci: As I was saying... Radical Gadgets has the most interesting tools. The cover product this month was an e-mail filtering package that uses Bayesian filtering techniques to block unwanted messages.
Janra: That's original! I checked Freshmeat today, and I think they only have half a dozen well-known anti-spam packages, not counting lesser products and tools that have just been released. Does Radical Gadgets always find products this original?
Vespucci: But it is original. And it's not an anti-spam package. It has nothing to do with spam.
Pater: Huh?
Vespucci: Let me explain. You know that Bayesian filtering looks at a message and uses statistics to guess what category it belongs to, right?
Pater: Yes; go on.
Vespucci: But that will work whether you use it for incoming or outgoing e-mails. Most people use the filtering techniques on incoming e-mails, to try and reduce the fire hose of spam coming in. But you don't have to stop there. You can also filter outgoing e-mails.
Pater: Why would I want to filter the e-mails I send out?
Vespucci: You've never sent a flame? Come on; I remember a couple of times that you flamed me over something minor, and sent a very embarrassed apology when I waited two weeks and simply sent it back, and asked you to read it aloud, and tell me whether that's what you want me to hear from you. And it's not just you. When you're talking with a person face to face, there are two eyes looking at you and reminding you that a person hears every cutting word you say. That doesn't stop conflicts, but it does mitigate some of the abrasive things we're tempted to say. On a computer, it seems like there's just a keyboard and pixels--no person you can actually hurt. So people hit harder, and you have incredible flamewars, often between people who conduct themselves like responsible adults when they're talking to someone face to face. It's possible to learn discipline, of course, and conduct yourself maturely, but all too many people don't realise there's a discipline you have to learn even if you're mature.
And so instead of just assuming that the only bad e-mails are offensive messages from people who've never seen you, telling you that part of your body isn't big enough and you need to buy their snake oil, or that you're impotent, or that you're not man enough for a relationship with a real woman and will have to content yourself with pixels on a screen--apart from these, there are offensive messages that you send out and then wish you could somehow take back and delete.
And this program does just that. Once you've trained it on your sent mail folder, it watches messages you send out, and uses the same Bayesian technology that's so powerful in identifying spam, and identifies when you're writing something you'll regret later. Then it saves it, quarantining it in a separate folder until you come to your senses and delete it.
Pater: That's... um, I'm going to go to their computer and order it from their website. Please excuse me for a moment. I really need to--
Metacult: Sit down, Pater. You're not going to e-mail out any flames while we're here talking.
Vespucci: Hmm... um, I hadn't meant to have a big discussion about the anti-flame software. There were several things that caught my attention, but what caught my eye most was a watch that keeps exceptionally accurate time.
Pater: Huh? Who would need a more accurate way to keep time? Most cultures find an hour to be a short time, and a cheap digital watch keeps more accurate time than a $5000 Rolex, because our watches are too accurate already. It would be awfully hard to explain our to-the-second accuracy to an aboriginal--I can't see why, besides pride that wants a possession to boast about, someone would benefit from a more accurate watch.
Vespucci: Oh, but there is benefit--worth paying $5,000 for a digital watch. Even worth having to change the batteries too often.
Pater: How?
Vespucci: The watch doesn't just have an oscillating quartz crystal; it has an array of sensors in the watchband that measure skin temperature and conductivity, pulse, even a clever estimate of blood pressure, and feeds all of these into an embedded chip with some extraordinarily clever software.
This software takes these data and gets a picture of the person's emotional state. You know how time flies when you're having fun?
Pater: Didn't Einstein explain his theory of relativity by saying, "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute--and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."
Vespucci: Um... that has nothing to do with the theory of relativity, and I'm not interested in discussing Einstein's spacetime now. If Einstein said that, he probably had a merry twinkle in his eye. But...
Come to think about it, that is a pretty good picture. The watch estimates your emotional state for one purpose: it keeps track of how long time seems to be passing. It has a normal timer that can count forty minutes until dinnertime, but it can also tell you how long the wait will feel like. And that's something no other watch can do.
Metacult: So it deals with subjective time? I read a book once which was trying to argue that time could be understood as something besides the number a machine has counted to. It talked about how a small child will ask Mom how long she's leaving for, and Mom's answer--she's really trying to avoid feeling guilty about leaving the child alone--are singularly unhelpful for a child trying to figure out how much perceived time must be endured before Mom returns.
Vespucci: Yes, and the minute-hour quote captures that. All watches tell what time it is from a machine's perspective. This is the only watch that tells time from a human perspective.
Metacult: Wonderful. What does it take into account besides clock ticks and the person's emotional state?
Vespucci: Huh? What else contributes to our experience of time besides the physical time and our psychological state?
Pater: Your question betrays nominalism. The way you've framed things shuts out the true answer.
Vespucci: We're entering the third millenium; I don't see why you're dragging in a controversy from medieval times.
Janra: Mmmph. Excuse me. I think I need a glass of water.
Metacult: Sit down, Janra. And don't look at me like that. I'm going let you answer that.
Janra: Certainly. Here are the steps to hunt a bear: First, fire your gun. Second, aim your gun. Third, locate a bear. Fourth, buy a gun.
Metacult: Try again.
Janra: Clothing to wear in winter: a heavy coat, then on top of that a good sweater or two, then two shirts and two pair of pants, then underwear, with woolen socks over your boots.
Metacult: Please be serious.
Janra: I am being serious.
Metacult: Then be mundane.
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The Watch
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