2 posts tagged “science fiction”

Today's stupid software idea comes courtesy of the most recent episode of Battlestar Galactica, which featured (as some previous stories have) the Hybrid, the organic controller of a Cylon base star (aka the big pointy bad guy space ships). This week, though, saw probably more Hybrid than any other.

Hybrids, you see, continually babble, a stream of consciousness mixing what sounds like system diagnostics, physics and poetry. After the episode ended, I thought "wait, system diagnostics? Well, if I open up Console, I have those. What if there was an additional process - call it hybridd - which emitted poetry to go along with the more prosaic debugging and whatnot that my computer spits out?"

I have an idea how to do it, too. Algorithm::MarkovChain is a venerable Perl module that puts out almost, but not quite, meaningful sentences, based on an input corpus. Tie that in to the syslog function, a bit of Launch Services, and there you are. (I'm sure you could do a bogstandard Unix version too.)

A further step would be to replace the Console UI with one that boils down the actual computer stuff and tries to fit it in with the hybrid's poetry, but that idea's a lot harder to do well, I'm sure.

Anyway. hybridd - an idea whose time has come. And now, thanks to Tom Insam, here's a Perl version. Requires the aforementioned module, along with File::Tail and Unix::Syslog, both available at your nearest CPAN mirror.

Now the spool's gone, there might be more IRC reblogging here. Or maybe not. Anyway, marking the launch of the new scif-blog, here's some random thoughts and conversation.

blech: io9 is going to be one of those really annoying blogs that has 30 posts a day which you never read, but *someone* does, so you keep running across it in delicious/digg/Google
blech: ho hum
ChrisDodo: even denton is now saying 30 posts a day is a bad idea
blech: "33 POSTS IN THE LAST 24 HOURS | RSS"
blech: Five sci-fi gadgets that fit in your pocket. I always thought Al had a remote, not the whole of Ziggy
jerakeen: hmmm. The distinction between 'the entire computer' and 'the entire _interface_ to the computer' is a very nerdy one, you know.
blech: sosumi
blech: I wonder if it does mark a failure of my imagination though
blech: "Ziggy is a supercomputer, therefore it must be the size of a room, therefore the thing Al holds has to be a remote"
blech: seems less of a leap than "Ziggy is a computer the size of Al's palm"
blech: but only given a certain way of squinting at the world
jerakeen: no, I think it's a remote
jerakeen: reason being (if I might be _ultra_ nerdy here), in the pilot, when sam is confused and vaguey remembers a name, 'ziggy', al explains that ziggy is the computer. You would have expected him to point if he was holding ziggy. jerakeen: also, supercomputers will _always_ be the size of rooms
jerakeen: the 'super' part there somewhat requires it.
blech: Pointing is important.
blech: Apparently cats don't get pointing. This is annoying.
jerakeen: only humans get pointing
ChrisDodo: all animals will look at the end of your finger when you point.
jerakeen: even quite advanced monkeys will look at the finger, rather than the target.
jerakeen: ChrisDodo++
blech: "We review studies demonstrating the ability of some animals to understand the human pointing gesture."
blech: boo, not freee
ChrisDodo: Journal of the International Symposium on Animal Pointing?
blech: Animal Cognition Volume 9 Number 2