A thing my mind can't comprehend and another that scares the crap out of me

Hello all

Firstly, happy belated birthday to Hannah, a girl who I work with who asked me to mention her.....and I'm nothing if not generous.

Anyway, this blog is about two things that I have heard today, one of which took me a tiny bit by surprise, and the other scares the crap out of me.

So we'll start with the thing that took me a bit by surprise. I talk to my best friend Jodi on a regular basis, our conversations are quite varied but one thing that never usually comes up is temperature. For those that haven't read my other blogs, Jodi lives in Canada, I know Canada's cold, even at the best of times, but in our conversation today we got onto the weather. I had mentioned that I was losing a bit of weight because I was able to bike and Jodi mentioned that she couldn't go biking because it was -36 celcius over there at the moment. Minus 3FUCKING6!!!!



THIS WOULD BE ME IF I WAS WHERE JODI LIVED RIGHT NOW

 My brain can't even comprehend that level of cold. The coldest I have ever been in was -22 and that was in a freezer at a company where I used to work. I couldn't survive more than 5/10 minutes at a time without needing a small break in the warmth......and that's 14 degrees hotter (it seems bizarre using the word hotter and -22 in the same sentence) than what Jodi is having to put up with at the moment. I can't even begin to imagine what -36 must feel like, I really can't. I respect Jodi for a lot of reasons, and that has just been added to the list. It feels almost ridiculous moaning that it's only 4 celcius over here when that's 40 degrees hotter than what she is currently having to put up with.

So that's what surprised me, but what scared the crap of me?

Again, this relates back to a previous blog, more specifically the one where I spoke about a radio podcast I listen to called RadioLab (which by the way, is still the most awesome thing that has been introduced to me in recent months). I started a mass download of all 113 of their podcasts last night and there was one of them was that entitled "Talking to Machines."

It starts off very similar to all their previous ones, a short story starts, so on and so forth. The first story is about a guy who started communicating with a woman in Russia and they share romantic emails, become good friends and the guy wants to meet up with her, even mentioning he would happily go over to meet her, but she keeps ignoring him. At one point he even mentions to her dates he would like to come over, but the email he then gets back doesn't acknowledge the dates he's sent and even asks him to send dates of when they can meet.

He keeps sending her emails but various bits are ignored and so at one point he decides to make up pure and total nonsense in his email, putting letters together to form a word that mean nothing, something like dhghohsodhfoh. He sends and she responds without referencing it and it's at this point.........he realises he's been talking to a machine all this time.

YOU COULD HAVE SEVERAL FRIENDS THAT LOOK LIKE THIS

It turns out that there's an computer algorithm that I knew nothing about where you can have full on conversations with computer programmes where they seem so realistic, you could never realise you are talking to a computer. There is one in particular called "Cleverbot"  where it learns from what previous people have put into it to give it a better response to conversations you have with it.

The thought of that just freaks me out. It does make me wonder how many people that I have communicated with down the years that I haven't met in person or spoken to on the phone aren't actually real. There are those that I know for a fact are real just by how they respond and that I have received stuff from them, stuff that a computer certainly wouldn't say, but then there's others who I have only communicated with by email where thinking about it, they could have easily been a machine.

It's a proper mindfuck.

So there you have, two points of my day that brought about completely different