#8: Languages 1

Languages are necessary for civilization. Toaster cannot prove this positively, but if you consider that him grunting at someone when he burnt the cookies could easily be misinterpreted as constipation you will see that it is true. We cannot pretend to be civilized if we do not communicate with one another clearly.

In this same vein, languages both unite and divide us. Primarily for defining groups. BubbaBill (when you type "BubbaBill" into GoogleImages, you get a lot of Bill Clinton!) speaks English (kinda) and don't speak no Spanish and he don't no want the public schools to try to teach his children no Spanish because this here's America and Americans speak American and if them Mexicans wanna come here they better learn American fast because he ain't gonna learn no Spanish and he ain't oughta. By pinning a piece of the American identity on the use of and fluency in English, BubbaBill and the rest of us (perhaps less consciously and more grammatically) are using English to define our in-group nationality. We divide our American English from British English or Austrailian English based on our pronunciations. Within the country we define smaller groups based on local dialects and vernanculars.

Toaster had a point somewhere in all of this, but it is 4am. Toaster is pretty certain that he began this post with the intention of proving that Welsh is really a foreign language. An alien language, even. Toaster is convinced that some sadistic alien managed to convince some impressionable Celts that the only true and beautiful way to communicate was to gargle with asphalt and saltpetre.

#7: Hold the Smartphone!

I like technology. I like prying it apart and seeing what's underneath. I like understanding its architecture and trying to fit that form with its functions. I like its ubiquity and its flexibility. It's cool, it's useful, and it's hackable.

However, there are some things in technology that make me thing that technology "experts" are really just a bunch of quixotic jackasses. Especially when technology "experts" go and make technology predictions. Such as here. Some of these predictions are warranted. For example, that the mobile smartphone will become the Internet browser of choice for many people is not a surprise given the recent successes of the iPhone and G1 Android. Their prediction that copy protection will become less and less relevant (the Internet itself is based off of storing, exchanging, and viewing copies of files anyway, be they .html, .php, .cgi, .doc, .jpeg, or .mp3) is also reasonable and based on good evidence (Creative Commons et al). Nonetheless, there is one thing in this article that happens to annoy the crap out of me.

The keyboard simply ain't going to go away! The "professionals" in the article keep mentioning that people are going to just be dictating to their phones to input content and typing will only be resorted to when privacy is needed or desired. Utter bullshit! I type good faster than I talk well, and what I write when I type is a lot more coherent, legible, and intelligible than my spoken speech. When typing, it is easy to edit oneself and make the sentence make sense. When speaking, especially in German (and English, I guess, although it doesn't have so many rules), if you lose a clause at any given point you're completely fucked for the rest of the paragraph. I don't lose clauses when I type because they're right there.

Furthermore, I would NOT want to try to design an experiment in tables and graphs using only voice input. I mean, how would that even work? "Y axis base ten logarithmic display CFUs in Table 1 column 3, X axis linear scale time units in Table 1 Row 1." That would suck! And to even think about trying to manipulate a spreadsheet or Prism file with data in it with just my voice gives me a faint sense of doomy nausea.

So no, the keyboard isn't going away. And neither is the mouse.

Get over it.