Device Register Revisited

As I’ve mentioned before, talking to our devices can be tricky. That’s a relatively recent development; an older problem is how our devices talk to us. Siri and Alexa actually sound normal enough to not be jarring—if they correctly interpret our request—and I would expect that to continue to steadily improve.

But there’s still a need for getting printed communication right, and it seems there will “always” need to be a human to look closely at text rendered on the screen to help. A classic example for those of us of a certain age is the dreaded “syntax error” message of early computer systems. Frustrating and opaque, there is almost no information contained therein: the programmer may as well have left off the word “syntax” and just had the single word “error” displayed instead. It might have been less infuriating.

I spotted a somewhat more amusing example at a grocery store recently. At the self-checkout, the display admonished me to “Come on, Scan and Bag it!” This could be taken two different ways. One would be as enthusiastic encouragement to participate in the grocery shopping process; to get into the spirit of commerce and joyfully ring up those eggs, asparagus and bell peppers and get them into a bag so I can go home and make a frittata! Oh, boy!

But another reading might feel like you’ve been transported to a busier, perhaps slightly grittier grocery store, where even the machines are in a hurry. One might feel like the message to “Come on, Scan and Bag it!” could easily be followed by “I don’t have all day!” or “There’s other people in line, pal!”

The difference, of course, is tone, which isn’t something that our devices have a lot of flexibility with yet when they are speaking. (That will be an entirely different and possibly much more amusing chapter in voice assistant development.) But it’s also something that requires much more care any time that text is displayed that you might ordinarily simply say out loud. At a time that everyone is forming text messages exactly the same way they would speak, the mistaken assumption is that you know how I sound in my head just by the words I’m typing. Perhaps that’s why we lean on emoji to ensure the other person knows what we mean. ;)

Rough Translations

Foreign films have the challenge of being understood in more than one language. Subtitles are problematic gateways to these films because 1) translation is just plain tricky, and 2) they are, of course, written—they’re not quite speech from another language. I won’t dwell too much on the first point, but suffice it to say that translation isn’t just matching up words from one language to another. Languages say things differently—sometimes much differently—than others.

The ears are working overtime to attempt to understand what’s being said—or how it’s being said—whether we want them to or not. You can hear the actors’ inflections and tone, but you can’t count on really understanding the shades of meaning they convey because culturally and linguistically they don’t always match up with what we expect. Luckily, context helps and we can watch the actor’s behavior, too. Maybe that’s part of why we sometimes gesture when we speak. Gestures may have been our first language and now they’ve become a supplement. Or maybe gestures are a side effect of speaking?…

The eyes are working overtime to take in the whole scene, going back and forth between the action and the subtitles. Luckily, the average adult can read around 250 words per minute and the recommended talking speed for comprehension is about 150 words per minute, so there’s usually enough time to keep up with the subtitles. (A different, but fascinating phenomena is that human languages all cluster around nearly the same rate of spoken information per minute: other languages just sound a lot faster.)

During the film festival that just wrapped up we watched a comedy about a couple who did voiceovers of films when they lived in Russia, before they emigrated to Israel. The film is in both Hebrew and Russian, but the subtitles gave no indication which language was being used, so it was sometimes hard to tell when something was funny because the couple wasn’t fluent in Hebrew or if it was just funny. There was an Australian film that I wish we had subtitles for because it was often hard to understand the dialog. In fact, we’ll often turn subtitles on for British and Australian films and TV shows—just so we don’t miss any words or phrases that we aren’t familiar with. (And, to be honest, sometimes we even turn subtitles on for American films…)

Tangentially, it’s interesting to note that Shakespeare’s plays are deceptively challenging for modern English speakers because they are in a distinctly different dialect, if not quite a different language. The biggest problem being that the meanings of many words have drifted since then: the way that real people use certain words in everyday life have changed so much that we fool ourselves a little into believing we understand Shakespeare’s characters, even when we don’t quite. Word-for-word subtitles would not solve this problem nearly as well as a modern translation.

But even reading the text of my native language being spoken isn’t the same as listening to it being spoken. And reading the subtitles while listening to the actor’s rhythm and intonation and trying to re-assemble them in real time is work—and not always satisfying. It just doesn’t land the same way that spoken language does.

But all of the complexities and difficulties aside, subtitles are still enormously powerful. They give us a way to understand stories and ideas we might not otherwise have access to. They can entice us to pay a little more attention, tricking us into more carefully considering things we think we recognize. They emphasize a perennial question of life as well as film: what is going on in this scene?

Walking and Talking Revisited

The standard for video conference technique is advancing quickly. I say technique and not technology, because teleprompters and high-quality cameras already existed, but weren’t in most people’s homes. The built-in camera and microphone that typically shipped with our pre-pandemic laptops were good enough for the occasional video chat but not for the multiple daily sessions that fill up some people’s work week. Picture quality, eye contact, audio quality and lighting are all important considerations for a lot more of us now in order to have productive discussions that don’t make us feel like either drinking or going back to bed by 11am. As a result, I suspect that more advanced video conference features and accessories will become much more widely available as time goes on.

With all of this attention on how we look to and at each other over video, it’s curious to consider how we talk to each other when we’re together physically (distanced appropriately, of course); even when we’re seated at the same conference table. I don’t think I’ve ever been at a meeting and felt like the other person just couldn’t or wouldn’t break eye contact for at least a few seconds to look for something in a document or take a couple notes. I mean, there’s usually a whole room to look around at, so it’s not like we have to lock eyes for an hour straight: it’s a conversation, not a staring contest. We just need to be able to naturally look each other in the eye some of the time.

Which brings me back to walking and talking. If you’re walking with someone at a normal pace and holding a conversation, you’re not spending the entire time looking deeply into each other’s eyes. (If you do, I guarantee you will step in some kind of poop. It’s that simple.) Instead, as you walk you’re looking at the bike path/sidewalk/road, watching the traffic, looking at the birds and occasionally glancing at the other person. But there are two very interesting things about this situation: 1) you can look at the other person at almost any time—even if they aren’t looking at you, and 2) that feels completely normal. It feels normal because despite the fact that you’re not peering into the other person’s soul-windows, you are having a shared physical experience. You don’t have to be perfectly in step—it’s not marching band practice—but you’re going roughly the same direction and are presumably close enough to each other to be aware of the same important things: moving bicycles and cars, other pedestrians, ladders, piano movers, wet concrete and dog poop.

Consider another scenario: having a phone conversation with someone while you’re walking or driving(!). You can’t see the other person at all and they can’t see you. Not only that, but they can’t see where you are or anything around you. Your partner in conversation is oblivious to what you’re experiencing, and the pace, tone and timing of their speech reflects that. At times it can feel like the other person’s speech is dubbed into the wrong movie. It’s not that they’re inconsiderate or self-centered; it’s that they’re completely blind to your current situation. They don’t sense the moments when you simply should not or cannot pay attention to them—moments that most people would recognize if they were present.

It’s another uncanny valley that we find ourselves in: if we’re going to sit still and talk, then it seems like we either need to do it over the phone or we need the ability to look each other straight in the eye without any weird web cam offset. If we’re going to move through our environment while we talk, it helps enormously to be in the same space. The look of our eyes—both where they are looking and how they look to the other person—as well as a shared sense of movement in the environment help us to exchange our thoughts and words.

Out to Eat

I think you could do worse than to learn a foreign language by spending nearly all of your time on food, drink and cooking. After all, you’ll need to eat if you visit a foreign country, and you may as well figure out how to ask for things you like or want to try. There are plenty of opportunities, too: you’ll get 2-3 chances a day to practice in that context; not counting afternoon coffee and tea, of course.

If you can ask for directions to good places to eat, make reservations and pay for a meal, you’ve actually covered a lot of ground, linguistically speaking. And if you can talk a little bit about or at least understand the preparations of various foods—kitchen tools and techniques—you’ll have even more verbs and prepositional phrases at your disposal.

Stories and food go together like peanut butter & jelly; everybody has fun and meaningful stories about food. You can learn how to tell one or two of yours in your target language, so that you have something you’ve rehearsed that you can use in conversation. People that you meet will have their own fun stories about food—you can listen to them and laugh over dinner and drinks. You can also just chat with your server or bartender and pick up new bits and pieces of the language, as well as recommendations for the next place to eat.

There’s a case to be made that human language only developed because we were able to grow big enough brains—brains which were a result of increased nutrition from learning how to cook food. If the very first language was developed as a result of food and cooking, then it only seems right to learn new languages with them.

The Name of the Color is Red

We finally went for a walk, now that the intense cold has retreated a little. Bright white snow still covers everything but the well-plowed streets and some sidewalks. Bright white, contrasting with the dark tree bark and the shadows that they cast on the snow. Looking across one of the fields we pass by, the snow cover formed a sharp, clean line that the forest edge met: bright white, thin line, dark trees.

As we walked through a woods, two bright red Cardinals flew across our path—two flashes of color in an otherwise dark and light scene—and then were gone.

In winter, it’s easy to imagine why languages that have only two color terms those words translate as black and white, or dark and light. The world in winter seems to lose most of its colors. They seep down into the Earth to hibernate; they fly South until Spring.

To be fair, the sky remains blue (“azure”, if you’re fancy), but so often it’s gray (or “grey”, if you’re British). And when the sky does happen to be clear, as it can be on those bitterly cold days, it can be so bright that it’s hard to look at.

And then there are evenings—especially it seems during colder weather—when the sky is clear and the color of the sky forms a breathtaking gradient. During twilight the sky runs from light blue near the horizon, where the sun hasn’t yet fully retreated; to navy blue; to the deepest midnight blue, where you can begin to see the stars just before the sky fades to black directly above you. (I exclaim this out loud Every Single Time I see it, which has justifiably earned me gentle teasing.)

So it’s a bit of a puzzle to me why it is that languages that have only three color terms, universally that third term is “red”. Sure, it kinda makes sense: ripe fruits, blood, dangerous animals and signs that say “DO NOT ENTER”. It just seems like blue should maybe have been given a little more consideration. In any case, light and dark, then red:

Languages, if they have additional color terms, go on to add either green or yellow (or vice versa):

Then blue:

Then brown:

Then gray, purple, pink, orange… (It’s kind of a free-for-all after brown, to be honest.)

There have been some interesting studies done in this area to try to figure out why cultures develop and use color terms in what appears to be a rather strict progression. The evidence seems to point to the way that sensitivity to small differences in color vary over the spectrum of visible light. (My own very intuitive, completely unsupported, non-sensical just plain wrong hypothesis is that the color terms are developed in the order of decreasing wavelength, just like a rainbow.) 

See how they kinda line up with the rainbow?

But if it ever turns out that the color terms are related to the change of seasons, it will not surprise me. After all, here in the upper Midwest in February, the world seems like it’s still stuck with only light and dark. It was nice to see the Cardinals add their statement of red, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of the color terms return to the landscape.

Matching

Your mouth is a rather abrupt opening in your face that sounds can emanate from. It is not shaped like the bell of a trumpet or a tuba, which would be more acoustically efficient. Cupping your hands around your mouth, you can form a kind of megaphone that helps your voice carry across greater distances (or noisier environments) than usual. Your ears (at least the weird-shaped fleshy parts on the side of your head) are shaped a bit like the bell of a trumpet or a tuba (on a very bad day), which is very important for hearing. Even so, cupping your hand behind your ear does something similar: it funnels more sound into your ear, helping you to hear even better.

Well, it’s not actually the case that your voice or quiet sounds are amplified or even “funneled” by your hands. It’s more accurate to say that your hands help your mouth or your ear to be better matched to the way that sounds travel through the air. Your cupped hands form an additional interface; a bridge that sound can more easily travel over.

Our hands aren’t optimized for this, of course. They’re not intended for this purpose; our hands are optimized for handling (Ha!) things, not sound waves. Our hands can reach both our mouths and ears and they happen to have useful acoustic properties—even if they’re not really megaphones or ears. It’s interesting that our hands can do this; that we somehow learned to do it at all and that we learn how and when to do it from each other. (An admittedly brief search did not turn up any evidence that other primates do this.)

In any case, cupping our hands can also be a visual cue to others. Holding one cupped hand behind our ear, perhaps craning and turning our head slightly conveys that we’re trying to listen; it’s a universal sign that means, “What? I can’t hear you.” Likewise if someone sees you looking directly at them with your hands cupped around your mouth, they might pay closer attention. (Or even cup their own hand behind their ear to listen!)

Getting your hands involved in this way when we’re trying to be heard or trying to listen necessarily also creates a different posture in us. It focuses our own attention even more because we’re physically more engaged than if our arms simply hung at our sides.

Just as the shape and placement of our hands helps to better match the acoustics of speaking or listening, our posture—our gesture—becomes more of what we’re trying to do. It reinforces the signal being sent to ourselves and others.

The Names of Thoughts

Spoken language is a beautiful, hopeless attempt at expressing thoughts with small movements of our faceparts and air. Out through the mouth; in through the ears. Written language is a beautiful, hopeless attempt at expressing the same thoughts and actions with notation on a surface, made by hand. Out through the hands; in through the eyes.

We come to writing after speaking and spend much longer acquiring it. The thoughts are first and we learn their names. We get more organized on paper, learning to spell the names of our thoughts; arranging them in straight lines, more or less. And this changes us.

By reading, we might learn words that we’ve never heard before and might not ever speak out loud. This is the same as studying a picture of a hotel where we have never stayed: recognizing a place without quite knowing what it feels like to arrive there. Dictate a thought onto a screen and you might feel the strain of trying to adopt the device register. (Perhaps yet another form of language that has yet to be formalized or maybe just a parlor trick, like juggling chainsaws.) In any case, it, too, feels strange: out through the mouth, in through the eyes.

Our speech and writing evolve, but are never quite the same because they can’t be. They are from different worlds; they are different worlds. Where the ears must be quick, the eyes can linger and return. Where the mouth and tongue must be agile, the hands can pause indefinitely to fidget and fumble.

This would probably sound very different if it weren’t written down.

Dinner Conversations

Two areas in which humans have advanced far beyond any other species are food and communication. We prepare food like no other animal not only by cooking, but by using an elaborate set of tools and techniques. And, of course, our language abilities have developed to an almost inconceivable level when you consider the range of complex and abstract concepts we can efficiently discuss; like what to make for dinner tonight.

We are not unique in either eating communal meals or our ability to communicate. We do stand out, however, near the edge of a certain precipice with another trait: the danger we face by talking during dinner.

The anatomy of most animals’ throats are such that an extremely important flap of tissue—the epiglottis—is directly on top of the windpipe (larynx) and closes it off completely from the rest of the throat throughout the entire act of swallowing. We humans, however, have a longer-than-usual passage above the epiglottis and the air that we breathe can carry with it the food and drink that we’re swallowing. Where animals have a railroad-type switching apparatus to keep food moving along the right track, we have more of an on-ramp/merge/off-ramp highway traffic arrangement; there are chances for both collisions and missing an exit, so to speak. In other words, if we attempt to both inhale and swallow simultaneously we may actually succeed at both—and immediately choke on our food.

Humans develop this “low larynx” after we are born, which creates a physiological hazard but also enormous acoustic and linguistic advantages. Other primates and human babies simply cannot make the same kinds of robust vowel sounds that adult humans can; vowel sounds which are found in almost all languages and are thought to be important for being clearly understood: the /i/ in “heed”, /u/ in “mood” and the /a/ in “palm”. Despite the fact that even today in the United States, choking is the fourth leading cause of unintentional death, evolution has apparently gathered more than enough benefit from human speech to offset the losses.

The simple, yet profound pleasures of cooking and sharing a meal with friends and family—talking and laughing in the kitchen and around the table—are quintessentially human. And, uniquely, they encourage a certain discipline: the subtle refinement in behavior of making a separation between taking a bite and taking a breath to compensate for an anatomy that no longer does.

Striking a Chord

I’ve noticed that over time it’s become less common to use the term ‘vocal cords’ and much more common to use ‘vocal folds’ instead. This seems fair, since I used to envision the apparatus as an array (or perhaps a bundle?) of thin ropes when it was ‘vocal cords’ and now I think of them as… well, something else. They’re nearly impossible to describe, and even when you look at several pictures of them they are difficult to comprehend at first. But ‘folds’ doesn’t immediately come to mind and they certainly don’t look like cords. I guess when I hear the word ‘fold’, I think of laundry and something that’s actually folded over, not just flaps of material. In any case, I think they kinda look like lips. (I don’t think there will ever be a movement to use the term ‘vocal lips’, but the description makes more sense to me, despite the somewhat awkward imagery and potential for confusion. Nonetheless…)

I also used to think that the misconception was simply caused by homophones: ‘cords’ and ‘chords’ sound exactly the same. A cord can be considered, among other things, to be a rope except not quite as stout. The vocal folds are like lips (to me), and so they are decidedly not like ropes (to me). However, a chord in the field of geometry is a straight line that joins any two points on a circle, the diameter being a very special case. If you consider the lips on the inside of your throat (yup, still a little weird) that can open and close, you might come to appreciate that each of the vocal folds is attached to the side of the throat, forming a chord instead of a cord.

Never mind that no one writes ‘vocal chords’, and never mind that ‘chord’ comes from the Latin chorda (rope) which brings us neatly back around to the wrong idea about what vocal cords actually look like.

Reading Out Loud

If you read your own writing out loud, you might hear words and phrases that don’t belong. You can then rewrite it to sound more natural—more like you. The funny thing is that it’s not the version of you that usually does the talking. It’s still you, but clearer for having first discussed it with yourself.

If you repeat this process over and over, you might catch yourself saying very interesting things; things that you never could have said unless you had first heard them from another version of you, reading your writing out loud.

No Words

We had been chatting, mostly about work, during most of the walk that night until we came to a large clearing. We turned off our lights and stood in the dark for a few moments, listening to the snow laying on the fields, the trees standing in the distance, the clouds above.

We listened to see if we could hear anything, which is different from listening to understand what someone is saying. Peace and quiet are words that feel much different when you hear them directly.

Pictures and Words

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then why wouldn't it make perfect sense that a gesture, a smile, a shaking of the head—in context, of course—would communicate as much or more than a well-written sentence? Maybe even a paragraph?

What images lack in precision they more than make up for in bandwidth. And besides, reading between the lines is a form of seeing.

A Few Thoughts On Precision

A couple, a few, several: these are handy terms in English when you don’t want to (or can’t) specify exactly how many of something you’re talking about. You see people walking their dogs on a nice day and you comment that you saw “a few” because you don’t feel it’s necessary to relay an exact number. You see “several” birds fly overhead because you couldn’t count them by them time they were gone and because frankly it doesn’t matter. You felt “a couple” raindrops on your way home—you get the idea.

I used to think that this was efficient and harmless until a few years ago. There was some serious discussion around whether or not the use of these words to describe approximate quantities was appropriate in a certain professional context. So, I figured I would just find a good reference for the ranges of each of these words and we’d be able to at least frame the discussion around those well-established and helpful conventions.

Wrong: nobody really agrees on how many a couple, a few or several are.

To be clear, I’m very certain that I’m correct when I say “a couple” and I mean 2—possibly 3. A “few” has always felt like it was between 4 and 6 or 7; maybe more. But “several” means between 6 and 8, or from 5 to 9. Whatever the range “several” covers, it should average out to seven. If you say “several”, you should be thinking “I’m pretty sure there were seven, but I’m going to give myself a little wiggle room just in case a photograph surfaces later.” I mean, “seven” is practically the root of the word “several”.

But, no. Some people believe that “several” can mean as few as 3, which is patently ridiculous, if you consider the following equation:

several = seven = 7

Some people believe that “a few” can mean as few as 2, which also seems absurd: scientifically, that’s “a couple”. And I can’t even begin to understand what kind of brain damage people have suffered in order to believe that “a couple” can refer to as many as four of something.

I used to think I understood what people meant when they said that they spent several hours painting a room last weekend. Now I wonder if they’re the kind of freaks who think that “several” just means more than two. 

And I do find it a little distressing that there could be some overlap between “a few” and “several”. How do you choose between using one of those terms over the other? How they sound in a sentence? If you feel like uttering 3 syllables or only 2? (Which, let’s face it, is really only a couple of syllables in either case.) 

So now I find myself avoiding using all all of these terms but “a couple” because I feel like there’s no solid ground to stand on any more and it’s just annoying. I’ve switched to using actual ranges when it matters (“about 5 minutes until dinner”; not “a few”) and just saying “a bunch” for everything else.

Hand to Mouth

Sometimes it’s hard to find the words to express something. Or sometimes there’s so much to say it feels like you should rush to get it all out. I think I move my hands more in both cases, turning my palms up to juggle imaginary balls or trying to turn a large dial that isn’t there.

It’s one thing to have a casual conversation, but it seems like more of the body gets more involved when things get interesting or difficult to describe. It’s like we want to try to grasp it physically with our hands—to take it apart, spread it out, turn the pieces over.

Like it would somehow be more efficient, more expressive if we could just take hold of it and let our hands tell our mouths what to say.

Arbitrary Formalities

Everybody speaks a little differently, but you can make generalizations and lump the way many people speak into one group—call it a dialect. And all dialects are able to convey the full range of human experiences among its speakers. Dialects are abundant, but if one particular dialect gets the right opportunities to be used for formal occasions, it might be called a language. There is a bit of linguistics humor that acknowledges this: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

All foodways are intertwined with culture and technique in a feedback loop: at once both influenced and influential. And all foodways have at their core the capacity to nourish human communities. I might suggest that a cuisine is a foodway with a cookbook and a PR manager.

Just a Little Different

I can’t help but wonder why it seems many Americans, myself included, are enchanted by British speech.

There’s no question that there is a certain lilt—an accent, if you will—a very different melody than typical American English that can be quite charming. And partly I think it’s the words and the way they are used. American English seems to have all the same words as British English, but they don’t always mean quite the same things: cookie vs. biscuit, (potato) chip vs. crisp, (French) fries vs. chips, etc.

It might be that these two things in combination give an American listener the impression that a foreign language is being spoken that they can nevertheless understand: recognizable words being used in sometimes unconventional ways with an accent that sounds at once both eminently suitable and yet exotic.

If this idea is taken too far, however, we run into problems like Shakespeare’s plays. Most of us like to think we understand exactly what is being said, but about 10-15% of the words Shakespeare (whoever they were) used in their plays have fallen out of use or simply changed meanings over time. One of my favorite lines (from Hamlet) is, “As brevity is the soul of wit, I shall be brief.” I used to think that this was a fantastic way of telling someone I was going to be fast and funny, but ‘wit’ here really means intelligence. Since Shakespeare’s time, the qualities of being intelligent and clever overlapped with being humorous enough that ‘witty’ came to mean ‘funny’ to most people, a phenomenon known as semantic drift.

“Wherefore art thou Romeo?” is another good example. Juliet isn’t calling out to Romeo because she can’t see him and doesn’t know where he is (he’s standing directly under her damn window!), she is lamenting that he is a Romeo in that whiney teenage sort of way, by asking whyyyyy must he be a Romeo, because, y’know, families.

But a modernized version of Shakespeare’s English is just different enough to entice us, invite us in and make us feel almost at home, even though we’re just visiting.

Wrong Languages

I studied German in high school. I thought it would be interesting to learn it because I have a German last name and half of my family tree was German. Relatives had at some point come to America from Germany. It seemed like I might get to know a little something about my heritage by learning German, though I wouldn’t have put it in those terms at the time.

Many of my classmates told me that I was wasting my time; that I should learn Spanish instead, on the grounds that it was more useful. After all, we share a border with Mexico, not Germany. But I wasn’t interested in the Spanish language, and I was determined to study something relevant to my family history instead.

Which did not come in very handy when I found myself traveling alone in Sweden for work in the 90’s. I stopped for gas on my way back to Stockholm and went inside the station to pay with the company credit card. The attendant seemed very business-like—not quite what I was used to growing up in Minnesota where warm smiles permeated every transaction. There was a problem with the card and she seemed to need more information. 

Unlike everyone else I had met on my journey so far, she spoke no English and two or three attempts to communicate (Swedish vs. English) what the problem was didn’t advance our mutual understanding. I remembered that someone had told me earlier that there were a few German television stations that broadcast in Sweden. (No explanation for this was ever given.) So in an attempt to understand and be understood, I asked her—in German—if she might speak some German. She scoffed and frowned as if that was absurd and pathetic; as if I had suggested we consult a Ouija board to figure out what to do next.

In the end, I finally understood that she needed an additional number to complete the transaction. I think she keyed in my driver’s license number (or maybe my zip code or birthday—I never did find out) and I was able to pay.

And as it turns out, according to a DNA test, I’m only about 5% German; the rest of me is Scandinavian.

Light and Heat

The subject of the relationship between light and heat came up a few weeks ago, and I was lucky enough to be let in on a summary of the discussion:

“Light equals heat”

“Nope.”

“Well then, explain the Sun.”

I can’t possibly improve any further on this sophisticated exchange, but it did eventually bring to mind the fact that light is sometimes described by its “temperature”. Certainly you’ve heard the phrase “red hot” or “white hot” and you might even associate it with iron work or forging steel. Where it gets a little nerdy is when you assign a temperature to “red” or “white”.

Firstly, the Fahrenheit scale isn’t used and neither is the Celsius scale. No, for this we use another scale called Kelvin. This is the temperature scale that physicists and astronomers like because 0 Kelvin is also known as “absolute zero” or “penguin butt cold”. Nothing in the universe can get any colder than 0 Kelvin; that’s it.

For a little context, “room temperature” is generally taken to be:

77 Fahrenheit (F) = 25 Celsius (C) = 298.15 Kelvin (K)

This should also neatly explain why no one uses the Kelvin scale to discuss any kind of normal temperature. (Can you imagine: “Boy, it’s a hot one; feels like 303 Kelvin!”) Mercifully, a change in temperature of 1 Kelvin is the same as a change of 1 Celsius, so it’s not completely silly. But Kelvins are useful to discuss things that are very, very cold and also very, very hot: like stuff that’s so hot that it glows.

So, if you’ll notice on the LED light bulbs that you see in the stores, they typically have some number on it like 3500K, which is its color temperature. The temperature corresponds to a nerdy physics concept (a “black-body radiator”) that you can think of as follows: an ideal material of this type emits light that goes from red to orange to yellow to white to bluish-white as it gets hotter and hotter. Incandescent bulbs behave mostly like this. (FYI: we recently discovered that dimmable LED bulbs do not look more yellow/orange as you dim them. Regrettably, they stay exactly the same color.) And it is incandescent bulbs and how they respond to heat that make this relatively simple concept absurdly difficult to keep straight.

If you see light from a low-powered incandescent bulb that has a nice warm glow—yellowish orange, let’s say—it probably has a color temperature around 2500K. If you see a high-powered incandescent bulb, it looks cool—very white with only a slight yellowish tinge—it might have a color temperature around 6000K, which is a much higher temperature.

Yes, this feels like some kind of joke: a red-hot fireplace poker emits “warm” light on the low end of the temperature scale and a white-hot flare emits “cool” light at the high end of the temperature scale. I wish I could blame this on some buffoon from the 1700’s who didn’t understand heat but it kinda comes down to our association of “warm” with orange and “cool” with bluish-white. And besides, it would feel weird to talk about color temperatures that went from “warm” to “really, really hot”.

In any case, light may not quite equal heat: there’s a conversion you have to do to the temperature first and I’m pretty sure you have to divide the color of the light by heat. Go figure.

All the Words

What if I knew “all” the words of the English language? For each and every subject and occasion, I could rummage around in my mind to craft exactly the right phrase: horses for courses.

But if I knew all the words, wouldn’t there be some that I would probably never need? After all, I manage alright knowing only some of them now.

Would I stop to consider those infrequently-used objects once in a while? Would I look at them like the glass jars on my workbench filled with miscellaneous screws and nails and nameless pieces of metal—specialized solutions waiting indefinitely for improbable problems to arise? Would I weigh throwing them out? Or would I be tempted to press them into service, even if they weren’t quite the right selection, or it wasn’t quite the right occasion?

Would this post be improved by better words or better thinking?

Device Register

Smart devices are starting to make good on the promise that we’ll be able to make nearly any request in the same way we would talk to a friend and that request will be fulfilled. But for now, it still feels vaguely awkward and we still get mixed results. Truly, it’s a wonder that I can ask anything from historical dates to the spelling of ‘necessary’ (which happens way more often that you’d think) to the weather conditions to the contents of my shopping list, but we’re just not quite there yet.

Anyway, what is that awkwardness? Partly it’s the anticipation of having to ask the question again if/when I don’t get the expected response. It seems to create a certain amount of hesitation—and not like the hesitation before your first kiss; more like the hesitation before you try to explain why something is broken. But the other part is that we’re actually attempting to speak a slightly different form of the language.

Much earlier in the development of speech recognition, I might have said that it was like having to speak pidgin English: a stripped-down version of English with a laser-focused vocabulary and non-existent grammar. But we’re happily beyond that now, so if it’s not a pidgin, what is it?

I think it’s actually an issue of register. A register is a specific way of using a language appropriate to the situation you are in—especially when talking to people with a higher or lower social status. Some languages have extremely elaborate registers that rely on entirely separate vocabularies. English is much less complicated and much more permissive, but still: there’s the way that we talk to our friends when we’re hanging out (casual register) that’s different than when we talk to the judge when we’re in traffic court (consultative register). We are affecting a register of sorts when we pretend to speak like Shakespeare: “Whither goest thou? Mayhaps thou hath partaken too much of thine cucumber sandwiches?”

When we’re giving instructions or asking questions of our smart devices, we hesitate in part because we’re trying to speak in a recently developed ‘device register’ that we haven’t learned growing up, so we don’t really know the rules or the limits—and it might change with the next firmware update. For now it seems to fall somewhere between talking with friends at a café, traffic court and asking HAL to open the pod bay doors. Repeatedly.