{"id":2627,"date":"1998-05-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1998-05-03T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/1998\/05\/03\/rrecognition\/"},"modified":"2018-01-14T20:28:46","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T04:28:46","slug":"rrecognition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/1998\/05\/03\/rrecognition\/","title":{"rendered":"rr: Tablespoons"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n
\r\n

\"'It seems very pretty,' she said when she had finished it, 'but it's rather<\/em> hard to understand!' (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.)\"<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\u2014Lewis Carroll<\/p>\r\n

I'm sure that people have been tempted to write directly on their computer screens for almost as long as there have been computer screens. But even after touch-sensitive displays were invented, writing directly on the screen couldn't be done until the advent of software that could interpret hand-written characters, a remarkably difficult problem to solve in the general case. (Douglas Hofstadter claimed, in his July 1982 \"Metamagical Themas\" column, that \"The central problem of AI is the question: What is the letter 'a'?\"; see also various other places in Metamagical Themas<\/cite> for further discussion of the enormous variety of shapes that people who can read and write English will recognize as the letter \"A\"\u2014and similarly, of course, for other languages.)<\/p>\r\n

These days, increasingly ubiquitous Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs, not to be confused with Public Displays of Affection) like the PalmPilotTM<\/sup><\/font> have brought a form of handwriting recognition to the mass market: the special modified alphabet called Graffiti\u00ae. Graffiti comprises pretty much the set of shapes you would expect if you took plain uppercase block letters and modified them so they could be drawn with a single pen-stroke. A surprisingly easy character set to learn, but the recognition technology is not as advanced as one might hope: first you have to learn the computer's alphabet, instead of it learning yours, and then you often have trouble getting the computer to correctly recognize the letters anyway.<\/p>\r\n

One of the first PDAs, however, went about solving the problem in an entirely different way. Apple's Newton\u00ae not only recognized anyone's handwriting (rather than requiring the user to learn a new alphabet); it learned over time to adapt itself to an individual user's handwriting. Many of the early discussions (and jokes) about the Newton's handwriting recognition software were, I'm told, based on tests done in \"guest\" mode\u2014in which the system did not learn the user's handwriting. I'm told that under real use, the recognition software quickly became quite adept.<\/p>\r\n

Which doesn't make the discussions and jokes any less amusing. In sad note of the passing of the Newton, I present this five-year-old piece, even though it's been widely forwarded on the Net. I considered attempting the same sort of trial with a PalmPilot\u2014but since Graffiti works on individual characters rather than words, the results would be far less entertaining.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\n

Tablespoons<\/h3>\r\n

By Robert McNally; copyright \u00a9 1993 by Robert McNally.
\r\nPermission is granted to reproduce this if the copyright remains intact.<\/p>\r\n

This poem was generated by entering Lewis Carroll's poem \"Jabberwocky\" into an Apple Newton. Nonsense words in the original were each written three times to get the most consistent match.<\/p>\r\n

Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
\r\nDid gym and Gibbs in the wake.
\r\nAll mimes were the borrowers,
\r\nAnd the moderate Belgrade.<\/p>\r\n

\"Beware the tablespoon my son,
\r\nThe teeth that bite, the Claus that catch.
\r\nBeware the Subjects bird, and shred
\r\nThe serious Bandwidth!\"<\/p>\r\n

He took his Verbal sword in hand:
\r\nLong time the monitors fog he sought,
\r\nSo rested he by the Tumbled tree,
\r\nAnd stood a while in thought.<\/p>\r\n

And as in selfish thought he stood,
\r\nThe tablespoon, with eyes of Flame,
\r\nCame stifling through the trigger wood,
\r\nAnd troubled as it came!<\/p>\r\n

One, two! One, two! And through and though,
\r\nThe Verbal blade went thicker shade.
\r\nHe left it dead, and with its head,
\r\nHe went gambling back.<\/p>\r\n

\"And host Thai slash the tablespoon?
\r\nCome to my arms my bearish boy.
\r\nOh various day! Cartoon! Cathay!\"
\r\nHe charted in his joy.<\/p>\r\n

Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
\r\nDid gym and Gibbs in the wake.
\r\nAll mimes were the borrowers,
\r\nAnd the moderate Belgrade.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

See also Scott J. Kleper's Newton Misspellings<\/a> page.<\/p>\r\n

Graffiti, besides being a means of mass communication widely practiced in cities ancient and modern, is a registered trademark and PalmPilot<\/a> is a trademark of 3Com Corporation or its subsidiaries. Newton is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.<\/a>, registered in the U.S. and other countries. So there.<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

Reader comments and addenda page<\/a><\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3-llowercase-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2627"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3352,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627\/revisions\/3352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}