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When Google Burps, We Swallow

Yesterday, I was checking out the “new and improved” Google Now feature on my iPhone, and when I pulled up the weather card, I was met with this remarkable temperature:  125 degrees in the light rain in Jersey City at 11:18 in the morning.

What?

Huh!

I quickly checked my other favorite weather site — forecast.io — on my iPad, and learned the actual temperature in Jersey City was a balmy, but humid, 75 degrees with scattered rain.  A 50 degree bogus increase in temperature is a really bad result from a company you pay to trust.

It was a little alarming to see how bluntly and boldly Google Now delivered the absolutely wrong — and dangerous! — temperature.  Sure, mistakes happen, but there was no subsequent notification, or even acknowledgement later, that the 125 degree temperature was a hiccough in the Google world — and that should concern us all.

When Google burps, we all involuntarily swallow.

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On Creating a Möbius Strip of Internet Event Boundaries

The University of Notre Dame published an interesting study on “Event Boundaries” that cause the everyday each of us to lose track of who we are and what we were planning to do:

We’ve all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find.

New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.

“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”

Continue reading → On Creating a Möbius Strip of Internet Event Boundaries

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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Moving House in Portugal

The Good — well, we did it — it took us awhile and happened in a very ramshackle manner. We moved ourselves with the help of a cast of extras. One ancient tractor, a front-loading “bin,” two borrowed trailers, the land rover, some Bulgarians, our neighbour Manuel and our friends Joachim and Zee.

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My Last Full Moon From Here

Last night, we had the most amazing nearly full moon, with the exact time of the full moon in the early hours of this morning when all sensible people are asleep — the light was excellent so I took the opportunity to snap away at our last full moon from this house.

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Death from Internet Video Stupidity

When I was a child, my brother and I regularly heard about kids our age who would get into all kinds of dangerous wacky hijinks, endangering their lives in the process. We would see news reports about a child getting hurt or dying but we would never see the dangerous circumstances in which the child got hurt.

Continue reading → Death from Internet Video Stupidity