I have mentioned that I have been impressed at Youtube’s automatically generated closed captions, which over time have gone from gibberish to getting the words right 99% of the time.  After I uploaded the first new installment of my interactive fiction podcast Ask/Tell this year, I discovered the latest advance: the captions now have punctuation!  And it’s startlingly accurate!  Check this out:

I think it was pretty clear from my tone of voice that there should be an exclamation point after the word “puzzle”, but I was astonished that the program knew to put quotation marks around that string of words.  And while the program didn’t render “Babel fish” correctly⁠—maybe it was trained on the British pronun­ciation of “Babel”⁠—it did get this right:

I.e., it knew that Lost Pig was a title and that Grunk was a character!  Wow!

Also, while looking up “Babel” to make sure that the Amer­ican pronunciation is in fact /bæbəl/, I discovered that apparently Unicode is doing cuneiform now, as the page indicated that the term “Babel” is derived from the Akkadian 𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠.  That is probably too small to read, so here it is in larger type:

𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠

…And apparently Unicode has been doing cuneiform since 2006.  But I’d never happened across it before! 

Somehow, no matter how many seed packets I open, I will never stop being surprised by the fact that the seeds inside look like the seeds the plant will eventually produce.  “These zucchini seeds⁠—why, they look like seeds straight out of a zucchini!!”

I live with two cats, one of whom is a tabico and the other of whom is a black cat who is quite elderly⁠—eighty-eight years old in cat years.  He is a sound sleeper and quite deaf on top of that, so when the automatic feeder goes off, he often misses it.  So when I hear the feeder go off, if I’m not in the middle of something I check to make sure both cats are eating.  One day I heard the clatter of kibble being released into the metal dishes, so I poked my head out and saw that, nope, only the tabico was at the feeder.  So I went to go up­stairs and fetch the black cat, only to discover that, while his actual lunch was sitting there waiting to be eaten, he was standing on the kitchen counter blithely munching on the top of a plastic bag.

I was playing on Lichess in one window and working on a Calendar article in another; I won my chess game, and then turned my attention back to the text editor.  I settled on a phrasing for my next sentence, which began “For a counter­point”, and started typing it in.  However, I had neglected to actually click over to the text editor, so I wound up typing those words into my web browser.  When I did, this happened (click to play):

Brian Wilson died this month.  Until the ’00s I had thought that he had died in the ’60s, because he had no part in the one Beach Boys hit of my era, 1988’s “Kokomo”, and I had heard that he had flamed out like Syd Barrett, who I also thought had died in the ’60s until I started writing this minutiae item.  I also thought that Brian Wilson’s death had been commemorated in a song by the Barenaked Ladies.  This is not a joke.  I was genuinely astonished when my girlfriend at the time informed me that the first line of the chor­us was not “Lyin’ in bed, just like Brian Wilson, dead”.

(In my defense, “bed” and “did” do not rhyme!)