A nice list of gadgets from scientists and celebrities in the Guardian today. Some of them are obviously a bit frivolous but the drawings are nice. I'll have to come up with one of my own, though I've been thinking that a really useful one would be a cross between the Total Perspective Vortex and the Point of View gun, the first to make the lunatics realise that the world is slightly bigger than that inhabited by The Little Prince, and the second to help them understand that occasionally someone else does actually have a point. It's all very well coming over all Edward de Bono about things (though not having read this I think I might actually be agreeing with him) but sometimes we just have to accept that the world will never be full of people who think exactly like we do. In fact, the only way to meet someone with exactly the same view as you would be via mater replication and even then, the instant of duplication would be followed by a diverging of opinion. .... pause for thought .... actually thinking about it, a copy of me would probably end up in a huge argument with me. I predict a riot. I am not depressed. I haven't done a Random Friday for sometime now have I. Just writing it seems like a cliche and once mentioned it seems impossible to start one - they just start and end with no preamble or epilogue, said the aardvark! And here is another article from the Guardian about the use of robots to mark essays. The exam board insists that the "robots" have achieved the same results as human markers but without the tiredness etc. I would hope that the algorithm is something a little more sophisticated then the online apps which purport to work out the reading age/minimum level of education required to understand a piece of writing. Now I'm not sure about this because if you use a common measure - The Fog Index - various online apps give the text to here a varying result between 10 and 12. The following nonsense paragraph :
The obscure and alliterative antediluvian mixtures that deviate tenuously from the norms and means of accepted obfuscatory almanacs, are, in the main, a conflagration of adverse reactions to the diasporic, conversational and textural beliefs propagated by the chemical and messianic upheavals granted to more alleviations of sufferings within the current regimen.
.. comes out at 33 which is just silly and makes me wonder how clever these routines actually are. Putting numbers to words simply by counting characters etc, is not going to give any indication of the true worth of any piece of writing. The essay markers must be something several magnitudes higher in order to reach the level of even the rookie human marker. We shall all just be organic jelly to feed the machines soon. Skynet anyone?
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