Google Home and Amazon Echo
I had to google both of those, as I'd never heard of either of them. Creepy! Along with a dash of "We're living in a science fiction novel!"
Me, I'm holding out for replicants.
Those at least sound like they have plausible benefits above and beyond "hey lookit me".
I will of course be getting one approximately when they are legally required and the law is strictly enforced and I don't know how to get away with breaking it anymore. But that's not much different (though stronger) from my feelings about a lot of THE CLOUD! and it's clear that most people are all about that.
God's listening device is called the Ecce Home.
As with so many things these days, Pinboard's take on the presentation was very winning.
We were given an Echo for Christmas, all it does is make the kids yell more. It's most useful as a hands-free timer.
The default mode for Siri on new iPhones is always listening.
Organically developing family panopticon. I actually think the practice in that link is promising but there are probably future pitfalls I'm missing.
I have an Echo. Its alright. It plays me songs when I shout titles at it. It makes a decent kitchen timer. It tells me the score of the ball game. It plays me the radio news from NPR and BBC. It hasn't figured out how to tell me the weather where I live, but the weather here never changes anyway. Sometimes I can get it to play a podcast, although for some reason getting it to play the right podcast is much more difficult than it should be.
The listening device only triggers when you say its name, and that name-listening circuit runs on a separate chip that stores all of 3 seconds of audio. I guess I could be more worried about the CIA hacking the thing to listen in on my private conversations about why the DC universe is better than Marvel, but really I'm more concerned about the crap podcast-listening support.
Echo is getting better at telling you the hours of random local stores / institutions, too.
Oh, also it has a remote control that you can use at a distance to make it insult your nine-year-old as he is walking into the room.
I read that they recently upgraded it to enable you to order an Uber or a Domino's pizza. Domino's also allows you to order by tweeting them a pizza icon. I guess given the quality of their pizza the only way to get more business is to provide more mechanisms for people to mistakenly order.
7: I can buy the "helping disabled family members" bit of a beneficial panopticon. My mom has MS, and about a year and a half ago she had two seizures with stroke-like effects. My dad was able to catch one of these fairly quickly, despite being out of the house, because of his home automation hobby--intentionally a panopticon, although one that requires more technical know-how. She had been taking a shower and he saw on his phone that the web-enabled light switch in the bathroom had been on far too long, so he sent a neighbor to check up on her. I shudder thinking about the alternative, as he had been out fishing; he wouldn't have been back for hours, otherwise.
I read that they recently upgraded it to enable you to order an Uber or a Domino's pizza.
It starts with crap pizza, but if they get that working with delivery from regular restaurants, a la SeamlessWeb, damn, that's a killer app right there. "Alexa! Send me pad thai, two cheeseburgers, and a bottle of merlot!"
Add in hookers and blow capability and you're all set.
We have an Echo - actually, two now, since we got a Dot to replace the tragically unsupported Sony Dash we had in the bathroom driving the speakers there. Music is definitely the major use case. The best trick I know of is that I have it rigged up with my bit of home automation so I can say "Alexa, turn on the cat feeder" and the cat feeder will dispense kibble for 30 seconds.
(It can control a few kinds of lights, including Philips Hue, but not set their colors, which makes it almost pointless).
As a loyal Googler, I will probably get the Google Home box and irritate the entire household by trying every request against both of them.
Great, so now you've set up the selective pressure for cats to learn how to talk. Just fill the feeder with a huge hopper, buy a couple hundred cats, go away for a few years and you'll be the master of viral cat videos.
If Echo can control your lights, why not give it a laser pointer so it can play with the cat too.
My wife picked one up a little less than a month ago and my experience is very like Spike's in 8. She asks it for the weather, the Cubs score, podcasts, etc.
So far, it's mostly just a novelty, though she did pick up an automation controlled receptacle so we can ask for the lights in the living room to come on or dim.
It IS totally crazy to put a listening device in your home, but my big problem with these things is that I am totally not interested in talking to inanimate objects, and even less interested in listening to myself hollering through the house when nobody's home.
I've never been able to bring myself to say a word to Siri. The last time I went home, my mother was dictating all her text messages to Siri like she* was a kindergarten teacher in an ESL classroom. Sounded completely crazy.
Computers have perfectly nice, quiet input interfaces like keyboards and touchscreens. I say, let's keep spoken language as our own special thing between us humans.
*I hate that I even have to clarify, but the "she" here is my mother, of course. Siri sounds like a he here in the UK, and is an it everywhere. Blech.
11
How do they know what sort of pizza you like?
Um, I meant, how do they know what sort of pizza you mean to order, if you just text them a pizza emoticon?
22 may be correct, since the emoticon is a pepperoni pizza.
And I was only joking about needing people to order accidentally, but if you look at the ways they have (anyware.dominos.com) they have something to rival Amazon's one-click called "zero-click ordering"- if you open their app and don't do anything for 10 seconds it will automatically order your pizza. You do have to set up a profile so they know what you want, maybe that's how the twitter one works too.
If you wanted pizza you liked why would you be ordering from Dominoes?
If you order from the Doninos site you get ominous text messages saying "Dominos pizza near your house" "Dominos pizza outside your house" and "Dominos pizza still outside your house."
"Dominos delivery needs to know if penis should be in the box or if husband/kids home."
The Echo's music search is weird, though. If it finds a song but doesn't immediately have rights to play it (not in your library or Prime Music) it just plays a sample. Which is fine, but sometimes another perfectly good match *is* available to play via Prime Music, next on the list. My son likes Mambo Italiano, and you have to specify an exact singer/album to get it to not play a sample.
If you order from the Dominos site
The paleo gods strike you dead. I'm pretty sure I haven't ordered from Dominos in about twenty years. Surely in the Chicago area they're banned? (I do kind of love that deep dish pizza is now universally recognized as a casserole. What an obscenity it is.) Sorry, someone pressed my pizza button. Back to the panopticon.
I'll say what I always say about these things: tech seems to be a self-selecting industry of weirdoes*, and so, while I think this sort of thing could maybe be a net positive, I'm not at all convinced that it will get there. Google Glass is obviously the ultimate example of this.
*present company accepted.
32: was "accepted" a typo or intentional?
30 -- I keep mostly true but sometimes I like to combine abandoning my kids with a feckless babysitter and poisoning them with extremely ordering-convenient cheap grain, while I spend their money on myself. Parenting!
Domino's isn't bad. It's better than Papa John's. It's better than Little Caesar's. I only like the thin crust though.
The Echo's music search is weird, though.
Yes. It also has an annoying habit of playing the "live in concert" version or "extended disco mix" of the song you want to hear, which is usually not very good.
30
There's a Domino's about 2 blocks from my house. It appears to be reasonably popular. I think I've been to events/parties where people have ordered it.
22-23
They need to design a pizza emoticon that has the pigs-in-a-blanket crust.
I recall a Domino's ad campaign a few years back : "Yes, we know our pizza hasn't been very good.... we've made it better."
I've never found out if that's actually true.
If it's better than Papa John's then it must have gotten better because the last time I had it, years and years ago, it definitely was not. Then again maybe Papa Johns has just gotten worse. I stopped buying pizza from there (not that it was a regular thing but, you know, order online) when the owner very publicly came out against the idea of people preparing food there having access to medicine. It was one of those nice overlaps between politics and basic self interest.
Is Papa John's the one that used to come with a little tub of grease and a single pepperonchini?
Now that I've written that out, I realize it was performance art, not food service.
It's practically "...a single plum floating in perfume served in a man's hat."
My son is learning the art of trolling.
I'm standing next to the Echo right now. He just took the remote, went into the into the other room, and, from a safe distance, told it to play Nickleback.
Now Alexa is insulting the way I smell.
"I can't find the song 'Dad is stupid' in your music library."
I had a case where I deposed N/ickelback's lawyer, who claims to have discovered them. I wanted to ask him how it felt to be responsible for the most uncool thing in America but wussed out and didn't discuss N/ickelback.
I bet Trump likes N/ickelback. Maybe they will play at his inauguration.
Speaking of Nickelback, this morning I set my iPhone to "shuffle."
Soon thereafter, I wondered aloud: "Do I really enjoy the harpsichord this much?"
I don't understand how Papa John's, Little Caesar's, or Domino's exists. You order from any random pizza place, and it will be better. I understand why McDonald's exists, in that any random hamburger place will be better, but it won't be a dollar and will take longer than ten seconds. But the chain pizza places aren't cheaper and aren't materially quicker.
Oddly, there's a Domino's pizza here, even though 80% of the restaurants are Italian and sell pizza. The American chains are McDonald's, a few Burger Kings, a few Starbucks, and a single Domino's.
Better half installed free trial of "roon" earlier this week and proceeded to be vocally outraged at its playlist suggestions the entire evening until child and I called time out on roon. Thus endeth our experiment in hospitality for digital interlopers.
I understand why McDonald's exists, in that any random hamburger place will be better, but it won't be a dollar and will take longer than ten seconds. But the chain pizza places aren't cheaper and aren't materially quicker.
They are cheaper. I think this didn't used to be true, but now it is. I can think of some better pizza places near here but there's no way they will ever have a large for under $10, which the chains perpetually do thanks to all the online coupons.
Many parts of the US do not in fact have tons of good, cheap pizza places. Some parts don't have any pizza places at all aside from the chains.
The only pizza places that I can think of that aren't significantly more expensive than one of those big chain ones are ones that are much worse or don't deliver or can't be eaten outside of the restaurant* (or usually most of those.)
*Punch Pizza, which is a chain but one only in the Twin Cities, makes amazing pizza. But it has like a three minute window where it's incredibly good, a few more minutes where it's very good, and after that you better have finished eating. So while they do have takeout I don't know why anyone would.
About once every mock trial season I let my secretary order pizza for the kids' dinner, from a non-national chain place, maybe it's north beach pizza? Anyways the dough is always so *sweet*, yuck to me but I think that's part of why they love it. At any rate, being good SFians, their favorite is the salads from the hole in the wall Vietnamese place. I worry about ordering from them because they seem to deliver via two dudes and a giant box on one scooter, which seems unsafe. But they are so nice! And the food is both delicious and nutritious.
55: Roc Islanders routinely deliver gas cylinders by scooter. Like, eight at once. I'm sure the salad dudes are fine.
Yeah, I'm an only 2-3x/year pizza consumer (although it's my favorite food, so never say that being awesome doesn't take sacrifice) but the non-chain delivery options for my house are (a) ghetto joints that cost the same as Dominos but are worse/vastly more variable quality and slower delivery; (b) really really excellent normal pizza that costs 2x what Dominos costs or (c) extremely fancy super amazing insane pizza that costs 10x what Dominos costs and why feed this to a kid. I'm actually most likely to pick option (b) these days bc I like the owners and why not but Dominos is cheaper and a bit faster.
God I fucking love pizza, but even aside from the no grains thing, I seem to have a mild but real reaction to milk beyond just lactose, so it's truly out.
What doesn't take too long and is fun with kids is to make your own pizza. Make a bunch of dough beforehand, store it in individual servings in baggies in the freezer, and then you can just thaw, throw on toppings, and pop them in the oven. Kids love it, and you can make stuff that tastes really good.
Yeah next thing I'm gonna br making tablescapes or doing elaborate craft projects with yarn so just no
The other day my five-year-old came home with something he'd knitted. Don't fight it.
Tigre will need tablescape skills for his Generalissimo career.
IPHMHB that I worked at Dominos 30+ years ago. Making dough, mostly. It was when they were first in Montana, and the dough machines were in the back of the original store. They had to leave the ovens going 24/7 -- so we made really good pizzas for lunch.
Our dough recipe then had a lot of yeast, and a really good high gluten flour I would pick up over in Moscow.
Did you have to go in a sealed train?
I love pizza so much that I could eat it every day. And I have done. In NY. I've only occasionally had it here and regretted it almost every single time.
I love pizza so much that I could eat it every day. And I have done. In NY. I've only occasionally had it here and regretted it almost every single time.
I delivered Dominos for a summer back in the pre GPS days. 1995, bitches. I got real familiar with the surrounding neighborhoods and was introduced to cultural differences regarding tipping.
I love it do much i had to go back for seconds there.
A decade or so ago I had to translate the script for a promotional video for a Japanese company for their networked home of the future (at that point just a concept). It was all appliance-focused - "Turn on the air conditioner in the living room," "Fill the bath" and so on - but the house talked back in a high-pitched anime-style girl's voice, and giggled constantly "Tee hee hee, the bath is ready." As if Siri were being tickled.
re: 19
That is basically me, except when in the car. If I'm stuck in traffic,* and I get a text or an email that is important, I just dictate the reply to Siri. It's surprisingly useful for that.
But every other context, I don't get it. I like other user interfaces far better, and I'm a naturally quiet person at home. I can't imaging intentionally shouting out loud to get a device to do what I want.
* I wouldn't do it driving at speed, as I find even the hands-free nature of it more distracting than I think is safe. But I will do it when stopped or crawling along at 2mph.
the house talked back in a high-pitched anime-style girl's voice, and giggled constantly "Tee hee hee, the bath is ready."
"Sadako, turn on the air conditioning."
That said, I could see xelA loving it as a way to get around parental barriers.
"Show Winnie the Pooh!"
"Turn on annoying children's music"
Seriously, that sounds creepy as hell. I don't think I could take that for more than about fifteen seconds. I think I'd rather have my house talk to me in the voice of Mr T. "YO FREEZER NEEDS DEFROSTIN, FOOL."
The killer UI app for me would just be really really good handwriting recognition.
If I could sit with a high-resolution e-ink style screen and hand-write notes in meetings, or sketch to-do lists, and then have those be turned into searchable text or documents, that'd be great.
My snobby husband won't eat Domino's. I ordered it when he was away on a business trip and ...... realised maybe there was a reason for not eating it. I enjoyed the nostalgia but it made me feel gross, and I do regularly eat (home-made) pizza so it's not just the foodstuff itself.
I don't have extensive experience with McDonald's in the UK, but I feel like it is way more expensive AND slower than in the US, to the point that you really are better off just getting a sandwich at a grocery store or something, as it will be cheaper and quicker.
I also can't fathom using Siri or other voice-command stuff - I'm a talker but it just seems like they never ever understand me, so what's the point?
76: yes! yes! yes! [satiated Japanese teenage giggle] yes! more! Nothing would improve my life more than being able to do proper searchable handwriting recognition and ntohing I have tried comes close.
I otherwise tend to spend a lot of time shouting at my phone in the car "OK Google play Steely Dan" or whatever, and getting nowhere unless there's no road noise, and in that case, the car is stationary anyway. Still, if the car is moving, shouting at the phone is safer than any other mode of interaction.
I'd rather have my house talk to me in the voice of Christopher Walken. "You want. Me. To turn...Up. The heat? Put. On a...sweater."
||
Just found on Archive.org a SBD recording of a Dead show I went to on acid in 1974 and it turns out that everyone was right all along. It really does sound different when you're straight. Also, when the volume is about 30db lower than at the live show. The enormous chords that I remember as being inside the mouth of a grunting lion are nothing more than tuneful now. Time for an experiment. I wonder if all the neighbours are at work right now ...
|>
Or Peter Falk. I'm doing a killer Peter Falk impersonation lately.
80 Don't you need some of that Owsley Orange Sunshine too?
Sunshine? In Knifecrimea? You must be having a laugh. rabbit droppings cut with methedrine, probably, and we thought we were lucky uphill both ways through the snow etc
I don't think it will work
Wasn't it Domino's who were experimenting with delivering by drone? Funny how quiet that's gone.
But Parenthetical's snobby husband is right: in any given British town with a population in five figures or more there's a better pizza place than Domino's, almost by definition. Probably not a chain, though Pizza Express is OK. I think P. is right that as a rule American fast food chains are worse in other countries (although the most disgusting fast food I've ever eaten was a burrito from some west coast outfit (not Taco Bell, can't remember what they were called) that my hosts had been talking up for a week.
tl;dr. One of the unheralded joys of retirement is that you hardly ever have to eat fast food.
The main thing I use Siri ("OK, Google", actually) for is cooking. Loads of the recipes I use have American measures and it saves a trip to the computer to do the conversion.
As and when these devices get fully open APIs and are as functional as that Google promo suggests, I'd be willing to have a listening device, though I'd probably prefer to still use my phone. The Echo is by all accounts pretty useful/flexible now, just not that great in terms of language parsing. Google's Assistant tech promises to be much better at that (and I've been reasonably impressed with OK Google's ability to parse and respond to single queries), but appears very limited now in terms of integrations. And who knows how much of the stuff like ticket booking is going to make it to Knifecrime Island.
We have several cabinet and walk-in freezers at work, which are usually named for easier identification (names of oceans, mountains, etc.) Someone put a picture of Walken on the door of one and named it Christopher Walk-In. This is an endless source of amusement at the office.
73: Cortana's designers at Microsoft decided specifically to make her assertive and even feminist:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/microsoft-cortana-sexual-harassment/
This result probably isn't a coincidence:
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/03/why-apps-like-siri-and-cortana-need-to-understand-suicide/
We have a freezer that people put blood and urine in. I assume they have their reasons, but I never asked.
89: "We" in this case being Domino's.
88 is weird because, of course, Siri cannot be sexually harassed, any more than a tree can be blackmailed or the Bodleian Library can get drunk. Interesting, though, that we humanise things that sound human far more quickly than things that just look human...
90.2: I'm not sure about that. Pepper's developers should really have included a can of Mace in the design somewhere.
91 proves my point in 90.last... no, Pepper can't be sexually harassed either, because it is an inanimate object. That's a category error.
I would imagine the linked story is due to the manufacturer's entirely understandable desire not to have its product show up in homemade pron films.
92: I know the reasons for the one at home.
Wasn't it Domino's who were experimenting with delivering by drone? Funny how quiet that's gone.
I think that was before the FAA came out with its rulings to shut down the possibility of using drones for cool things.
Once the talking assistant sector matures a bit, there is going to be a sizable market for customization that sexify the voices and a willing to talk dirty.
I very much doubt it will wait that long. In fact, I bet it already exists but I'm not going to google it now.
24- In Soviet Russia, disgusting pizza app clicks you!
The best trick I know of is that I have it rigged up with my bit of home automation so I can say "Alexa, turn on the cat feeder" and the cat feeder will dispense kibble for 30 seconds.
To me, this is the most appealing feature mentioned so far in this thread. Atossa is crawling and seems to like eating cat food. It would be nice to be able to dispense a serving of cat food by voice command when the cat is around and the baby and I are in another room, or when I've picked her up and am holding her back.
The biggest reason I haven't paid attention much to the voice-activated side of technology is that I'm not in the habit of it, even with my phone. 90+ percent of the time I use my phone is silent. I text, I take pictures, I read the Internet, I play games, I look stuff up, I make short businesslike phone calls when texting wouldn't make sense. (An average of once a week I have a conversation with my parents, and I don't need Alexa for that.) I can do all of that at work or on the bus. If I start using voice-activated light switches or dictating to-do lists, I'm worried I'd forget where I am when I do so.
It's a pity that the recording process behind voices like Siri is so involved* because it would be amazing to have the option of different voices, especially ones from people who already have distinctive talking patterns. I'm pretty sure a lot of people would pay extra for the opportunity to have Siri/whatever speak with the voice of James Earl Jones, or (be yelled at by) Sylvester Stallone, or Fran Drescher**, or Pee Wee Herman, or whatever.
Also the people who like New York Pizza should be aware that Domino's now apparently sells something called "Brooklyn style", so even if you aren't in New York you can still eat New York pizza.
*Like, weeks and weeks of full time work reciting nonsense syllables over and over
**Note that I did not say "speak to them". But I would certainly toss in money to buy this change of voice for a friend, especially if it was hard to switch back afterwards.
101: Haven't some GPS brands already done this with a number of celebrities, though?
It's a pity that the recording process behind voices like Siri is so involved
I saw an interesting video about the process (which you might have seen as well). Let me see . . . I think this is what I was thinking of.
102- Yes, my brother has Patrick Stewart as his navigator.
The difference between how people interact silently vs. speaking seems similar to how some news sites make you watch a video and won't give you text to read even if you want to. So if our future is all speaking to devices and watching videos instead of typing and reading, just kill me now.
AIMHMHB, my GPS has a funny glitch where Dr. is rendered as "Drive" if it is the last word in an address but as Doctor if it come it comes earlier. So if I had it on and was driving out to LI on the LIE to visit the folks it would say to take "Expressway Doctor South".
101: I wonder if this is fixable. There are neural networks that will impose an "artistic style" on top of picture. Maybe something for vocal style is doable.
32: was "accepted" a typo or intentional?
Intentional, of course.
This seems like a good place to vent about this: the OK, Google ad where the guy is at the Grand Canyon and says, "OK, Google, how big is the Grand Canyon?", and the phone replies with the square mileage of the National Park, and the guy says, "That's really big." How many ways is this stupid?
1. That's not the size of the canyon in any meaningful sense, because the park's boundaries do not coincide with the rim of the canyon. That's asking the population of a city, and getting the population of the county it's in.
2. A specific, large number is never a good answer to a question like that, because it's gibberish to 98% of people. 10,857,372 (or whatever) may as well be 12,947,955 or 20,535,934 or 23,956,332,567. Without context or referent, it's almost literally meaningless. And the guy would say, "That's really big" to any of them. He'd probably say it to any number above 1000. WTF does he know about surface area in square miles?
3. It's a canyon. Projected 2D surface area is a terrible way to capture its immensity. Either volume or 3D dimensions would do a much better job of capturing it; the latter (X long, Y wide, Z deep) would probably be meaningful even without context.
Did nobody involved think of any of these things? All three of them hit me the very first time I heard the ad; they're not nit-picky complaints. 1, in particular, is simply a matter of answering the question wrong.
I'm pretty sure the phrase "OK, Google" would bug me regardless*, but that ad has caused me to loathe it. "OK, Google, can you gee-whiz me some misinformation?"
*I never ever say "Hey, Siri" either; when I do use it, I hold down the home button
I think society as a whole needs an agreed upon set of measurements that involve things we actually understand rather than numbers which are mostly meaningless to us on a practical level. Like, instead of a surgeon saying "the five year survival rate is 27%" they said "being alive in five years will be like going to the closest liquor store and finding your favorite beer even though you don't usually find it there, but it's not on sale" or something.
The medical field has already pioneered this through the fruit-method of tumor sizing.
I think they should use picoWales.
I guess that's area again, not volume.
104
So if our future is all speaking to devices and watching videos instead of typing and reading, just kill me now.
Ditto.
I read much faster than people speak. I read stuff for 30 seconds and switch to something else and come back to it later. If I want to respond to something, then I often copy and paste it into my reply. I read while watching TV or having a conversation with someone else. I read on a phone with a 4-inch screen, an e-book reader with a cheap black-and-white screen, and on my work computer with security systems that block videos. And as I said, I often do all this when surrounded by co-workers or complete strangers. Video content or software with a voice interface is useless with all this stuff.
Sometimes I think my unwillingness to adapt to video technology or voice interfaces is a sign of age. Technologically inept dad here, har har. But I've had most of these habits since I was in my 20s.
108.1 is definitely a big problem, agreed.
108.2 could be a problem but is expressed badly. All those numbers have the same number of digits. It's true that I think of 10 million and 12 million and 20.5 million as vast yet indistinguishable. On the other hand, I'd try to distinguish between 10 million, 100 million, and 1 billion.
And 108.3 is only something that an architect or engineer would care about. Yes, to me the square mileage of the Grand Canyon is a lot more interesting than its volume. I have much more of a frame of reference for that than I do for cubic mileage or some other three-dimensional statistic. I also wouldn't ask about the chemical composition of the rocks in it, because I don't have a clue how that differs from the rocks where I live or which one is which when I'm looking for it. But a square mile? It's about twice the size of my official neighborhood, so I have an idea of how many people live in it at a certain density and how easy it is to walk around...
But the great thing about having a conversation by reading and typing is that if we were having this conversation verbally, I'd have to go "OK, you're right about the second thing, no wait actually you're sort of right about it but not really..."
"twice the size of my official neighborhood"
People are also terrible at estimating squares and cubes, so did you mean twice the area or twice the linear dimensions? I suspect people usually picture the latter if they are thinking about squares or circles.
10 million and 12 million? That's like the difference in population between North Carolina or Georgia on one hand and Pennsylvania or Illinois or the other. I dunno, I think that's meaningful--the latter two can throw their weight around more in various ways (although that difference is shrinking). And as for 10 vs 20.5, a factor of two is almost always meaningful.
I would totally think volume is more meaningful than surface area for most applications. If a farmer with a heck of a lot of land made a grand canyon surface-shaped crop circle, that's not nearly as impressive. I admit that imagining large volumes can be hard; for intuition, I try to start by imagining a cubic mile or kilometer of water and work from there towards the amount/shape of what's being described.
115: This is why I get nervous when I see data visualizations involving circles, since it can be hard to tell what mapping function they're using to get from data to circle size. Hopefully area is proportional to quantity instead of radius, but I see the latter too often.
Projected 2D surface area is a terrible way to capture its immensity. Either volume or 3D dimensions would do a much better job of capturing it;
Volume really wouldn't. Humans are terrible at comparing the volume of two different-shaped solids. Really bad at it. I still have huge difficulty with the fact that a litre water bottle can fill almost two pint glasses - in my head they're almost the same volume.
The most natural answer to how big the grand canyon is to me would be something like "The grand canyon is (x)miles long, and an average of (y) meters deep". Giving actual volume numbers would be meaningless to my imagination but "three times your commute long"* and "about nine stories down"* are things I can easily picture.
*Not actual numbers, obviously.
You can put X million Olympic pools in it.
117: But they're also not very good with areas--once you get away from highly regular shapes, nobody knows anything. And nobody (among hoi polloi) really gets the difference between two square miles and two miles square.
To be clear: I agree that "ten million cubic miles" or whatever isn't informative. That's why I wrote, "Without context or referent, it's almost literally meaningless." So the only useful answer is something like "all of Lake Michigan would fit in the Grand Canyon." But projected surface area is stupid, since it's not as if we'd care about the GC if it were the same area but 10' deep. Its immensity is inextricably tied to its volume.
And this goes back to my 32: apparently Google (the algorithm, not the company) is incompetent to give a proper answer which, again, is going to involve context ("the state of Connecticut covered with enough water to hide the Empire State Building"). Which means that it can't meaningfully answer the question, but the people in charge think that it has because it successfully translated the oral question into a written search string which pulled up a numerical result that sounds somehow authoritative. The video in the OP, which is almost certainly overstating capability, does a bit of this with the boy's science questions.
118 and 119 get it right. In case it's not already clear, I agree that the volume number would be as meaningless to the interlocutor as the square mileage. But at least it's the right meaningless number.
So the only useful answer is something like "all of Lake Michigan would fit in the Grand Canyon."
See, I don't even think this is very useful unless the average American has an instinctive understanding of how deep Lake Michigan is. The best answer is going to be length-breadth-depth.
On a related note, interesting fact (at least interesting to Knifecrime Islanders) I learned the other day: Tower 42, formerly the NatWest Tower, is the tallest building in the City of London.
There is more floor area underground at the Bank of England than there is above ground in Tower 42.
Please tell me they renamed it as a tribute to Douglas Adams.
There is more floor area underground at the Bank of England than there is above ground in Tower 42.
Well, obviously. Those vaults take up a lot of space.
unless the average American has an instinctive understanding of how deep Lake Michigan is
And they surely don't, because it's surprisingly shallow (the Great Lakes vary quite widely in depth; a few years ago Iris and I worked on some data visualization on the topic). But they would understand that it's both big in area and deep enough that oceangoing ships sail on it.
"It would take X days for Niagara Falls to fill it" might be nice.
I certainly have no idea how much water is involved with lake Michigan.
While google itself gives the useless result mentioned already, the first link you get if you search "grand canyon size" includes this description, which is pretty solid:
Here's another way to look at size: a trip to the bottom of the Canyon and back (on foot or by mule) is a two-day journey. Rim-to-rim hikers generally take three days one way to get from the North Rim to the South Rim. A trip through Grand Canyon by raft can take two weeks or longer, and experienced backpackers have spent weeks in the more remote areas of the Canyon.That conveys "it's really huge, seriously" more effectively than most numbers I can think of would.
Here is how the Park Service itself describes it:
Unique combinations of geologic color and erosional forms decorate a canyon that is 277 river miles (446km) long, up to 18 miles (29km) wide, and a mile (1.6km) deep. Grand Canyon overwhelms our senses through its immense size
True to form, many of the images you get by searching for "bank of england vault" are of the queen counting her money.
127 would have been a (more than) acceptable answer to the original query. Actually, that's the sort of thing that a worthwhile digital assistant (or whatever BS term we're supposed to use) would have given. Anything less is pretty much worthless.
One thing along those lines that always confuses me is real estate pricing, especially in very expensive cities or regions. To wit: If I say "I want to buy a $400,000 house in south Mpls," I think most people who live around here would have a pretty good idea of what the size of that house would be, what amenities it might have, and what specific neighborhood it might be found in. And even if I said "I want to buy a $750,000 condo in downtown Mpls," most people would have at least a vague idea of what you might get for that much money. But say in NYC or SF, what's the difference between a $3 million apartment and a $6 million apartment? I guess I'd assume that the $3 million wouldn't get you very much if it had a view of Central Park or something, but when I see these various luxury places for sale in the paper or on TV or something, it seems like the numbers are just pulled out of a hat.
Part of the dissonance seems to be that there are plateaus, such that $4.5 million will get you X, and $5.5 million will get you 120% of X, but if you go up to $8 million, suddenly you're not in the ballpark of X -- it's not even the same fucking sport. Maybe I'm just ignorant of some obvious pricing structure for fancy real estate, but shit seems like something you'd need Black Scholes to figure out.
129: Especially the last bit, and especially if it was for everything.
"Siri: How large is the grand canyon?"
"Grand Canyon overwhelms our senses through its immense size"
"Siri: how far is the nearest gas station?"
"How far we travel in life is not measured by our footsteps but by the lessons we learn on the way."
This is another app that I would helpfully buy for someone else's phone without telling them.
129: Well, it was also written by someone who probably answers this question constantly, as part of their job. The most useful way to answer very common questions is definitely something you learn quickly at a job like that.
I saw in vision the Lord Jesus in his kingdom and glory. He revealed to me the depth of man's loss, what it was, and the way of redemption therefrom. Then I was able to bear an open testimony against the sin that is the root of all evil; and I felt the power of God flow into my soul like a fountain of living water. From that day I have been able to take up a full cross against all the doleful works of the flesh.
Lake Missoula had only half as much water as Lake Michigan, but when the dam broke, the ensuing outflow was 60 times as much water as the Amazon. That's the way the tour guides explain it, anyway.
And here's a very old joke: You've heard about the North Dakota lottery, where the winner gets $50 per year for a million years? Ticket sales were sluggish, so they upped it to $50 a year for 2 million years.
(I see that the nps says '10 times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world.' That's a lot of water. But pretty much completely incomprehensible.}
133: So Natilo is leading a crusade to Silicon Valley?
133 to 131; Natilo's GPS has the voice of William Blake.
So the GPS thinks he should lead a crusade. Will it tell him where to get gas for that?
When I was driving around the western US recently my GPS apparently got confused by being somewhere foreign and started issuing directions in two distinct voices, "snooty British woman" and "slightly drunk American woman". They would generally give directions one immediately after the other, often slightly different directions, giving the impression that they had had some sort of massive argument and were carrying it on by passive-aggressively correcting each other's navigation.
I don't even remember what the voice of my GPS sounds like. I turned it off about 2 years ago, and have never turned it back on.
I use Waze, sometimes, too, and I've no idea what the voice of that sounds like, either.
The computer at our local taxi company pronounces St. Swithun's as "Street Swit Huns". Should be a gang.
139 sounds amazing. I mean, bad for navigation, but amazing.
140: turn-by-turn is almost never what I want--I have a very good sense of direction and a good head for maps--so I basically never use it, but that does mean that I fail to use it when it really would help (eg deep in a subdivision full of winding streets).
142: it was kind of like the arguing tannoy at the start of "Airplane".
P.A. SYSTEM (female v.o.)
The white zone is for immediate loading
and unloading of passengers only. There is
no stopping in the red zone.
P.A. SYSTEM (male v.o.)
The red zone is for immediate loading and
unloading of passengers. There is no
stopping in the white zone.
P.A. SYSTEM (female v.o.)
No. The white zone is for loading and
unloading, and there is no stopping in the
red zone.
P.A. SYSTEM (male v.o.)
The red zone has always been for loading
and unloading, and there is never stopping
in a white zone.
P.A. SYSTEM (female v.o.)
Don't tell me which zone is for stopping
and which zone is for loading.
P.A. SYSTEM (male v.o.)
Listen, Betty. Don't start up with your
white zone shit again!
P.A. SYSTEM (female v.o.)
Oh, really, Vernon! Why pretend? We both
know perfectly well what it is you're
talking about. You want me to have an
abortion.