Monday, October 13, 2008

If only they had something like this for food consumption…

Gmail has a new application called “Google Goggles” that helps you refrain from sending embarrassing emails when you are drunk by using mathematical puzzlers. And who said you would never use math again once you got out of high school?

Basically, before you can send an email (only on nights/times you specify as party nights), a few basic arithmetic problems come up on the screen that you must answer correctly within a short period of time in order to send the message.

Seems pretty genius, I know. I don’t think I will be utilizing this service personally, usually when I get home and I’m drunk I don’t head right over to my computer to send emotionally charged emails. Rather, I check out foods that are available for immediate consumption, or beds available to pass out in.

And even though it is the first of its kind and pretty revolutionary, I do see a few flaws with this system:
1. People who just aren’t good at math in general may be seen as drunk all the time.
2. People who are really book smart (but usually not super street smart) will easily trump the simple math problems and send their drunken messages to the world.
3. Really emotional people may damage expensive technical equipment over frustration after not being able to send their innermost uninhibited thoughts. Have we forgotten where the term “RAGING alcoholic” came from?

Anyways, it’s a funny application and I give mad kudos to its creator, as well as Gmail, mostly for it’s clever name.

But I had one more qualm with the system, though it is entirely my own fault. I was a little disappointed because at first I thought they had developed some sort of algorithm that could determine that you were typing in a drunken stupor. Like based on the amount of misspelled words, spacing problems, etc… I don’t know I’m not an algorithm scientist, it just would have been way cooler if that’s how they did it. (note to nerd somewhere: develop this algorithm. I’ll find great uses for it)

(totally unrelated note: UCLA scientists recently discovered a 13-million digit prime number. It’s the first Mersenne prime number with more than 10 million digits. I’m sorry for people doing jobs like that.)

So anyway, back to those Google Goggles. A novel idea, and I hope we see something like this soon that will send an electric shock through your body if you are trying to eat too much pizza when you’re drunk. Just kidding. When you aren’t eating enough pizza while you’re drunk.

1 comments:

Nussy said...

Those scientists finding those prime numbers are a fraud. They just have a computer doing all the hard work for them. They probably sit around, drink beer, eat pizza and send embarrassing emails because they can do math.