Desk Set

Back in the early 90s I saw Desk Set, a Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn movie, on TV. The story is about a computer expert (Tracy) who is setting up a system for storing a TV network's research department's archives. I thought the representation of computers was ridiculous.

I happened to see the movie on TV again last year, and immediately began thinking (or perhaps, just simply replaying my earlier thoughts) about the unrealism of the movie's computers. The idea that people could simply type an English phrase (e.g., "What is the annual rainfall in the Sahara?") into a computer and get an answer is just crazy! While watching the movie I brought up the IMDB to look up facts about the movie... and I did a Wikipedia search on ENIAC (the computer that the movie's EMERAC seems to be spoofing).

And suddenly I realized that technology has caught up to the movie's speculative fiction... today we can simply type a question into our computer and have it bring up the answer. (And, incidentally, the annual rainfall in the Sahara is below 25mm). The movie suddenly seemed to have a fairly sophisticated idea of computers: garbage in/garbage out (i.e., if given faulty data, the computer will return faulty data), programming bugs, poorly worded questions giving undesired answers, etc.

I remember wondering about all sorts of things as a kid and knowing that I'd never know the answer--the barrier to researching the information was simply to great for matters of idle and passing curiosity. The internet has changed that, and these days I consult the Wikipedia at the slightest impetus.

In the early world wide web days (perhaps 1995?), there was a guy who kept a log of what he ate for lunch every day... it was the first thing I saw that resembled a blog and seemed quite striking (for it mundaneness & humanity) at the time.

In the spirit of that lunch diary, here is what I looked up on Wikipedia in the last seven days (a fair percentage of these entries represent the research for the book chapter I'm writing on randomness, and not idle curiosity):

ENIAC
Bitter Sweet Symphony
Cranberries
Cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator
Democratic Party, United States presidential primaries
Arsenio Hall
The Arsenio Hall Show
Talk show
Dick Cavett
FLOPS
Radioactive decay
Random seed
Hardware random number generator
Pseudo random number generator
Jackson Pollack
Pecan
Hickory
Iraq
A Year with Swollen Appendices
Lagniappe
Meret Oppenheim
Linear congruential generator
Pseudorandom number generator
Random number generator
Zinc toxity
Prejudice
Omega-3 fatty acid