Flounder vs Founder

In the series 'words almost spelled the same and almost mean the same thing, but are not'

Both mean many things but they come closest as things that happen to you metaphorically relating to the sea.

Flounder is the flat fish, and to flounder is to be like a flounder on the deck of a ship and flail about.

Founder, on the other hand is one who starts something (very different!) because they are at the base of things (cognate with the foundation). 

But to founder is not to found something but to begin the process of sinking, to founder upon the shoals. 

Certainly a flounder could founder on the shoals if it put itself into such a bad position, but that is less likely than that a founder of an enterprise would flounder before pivoting to a greenfield market (count the mixed metaphors!).

The etymology of founder is incontrovertibly via French fond from Latin fundus, the bottom. Flounder, the fish, supposedly is cognate with flat (obvious) and plaice (obvious biologically but not immediately obvious phonetically). Despite my metaphor about a fish flailing about, to flounder however has a controvertible provenance, probably mixed up with other similar sounding words, like flop and flail and fluke (is that another fish) in an example of phonosemantics.

So flounder, fish, flop. Founder, sink to the profound bottom.

If you know a word, you can't unhear it

Horse.

Big animal with a mane and long tail, big distinctive head large body with long thin legs. That word can't be anything else.

For a native speaker, any word in your language is like an automatic switch. It says what it is, there is no other thing it could be but what it says. It stuffs itself into your mind and there's no unstuffing it.

When learning a language, a word has this ethereal feel. It could mean something else, it could mean, well I'm not sure, is it some sort of ... no, is it ... bread? I'm sure it was an animal...or  maybe not.

This goes for syntax and phonology too. Lots of leniency as a learner, there is no wiggle room at all for a native speaker. For a native speaker the slightest deviance sticks out as something entirely different. Suppose you mean 'I bet a dollar', but you said 'I bit a dollar'. Why would you bite a dollar, that is crazy! Even if you're at a gambling table, people would get all bent out of shape. "Did you mean 'bet' or 'bit'. No one bites dollars here they only bet. Did you really bite a dollar?".

Insidious vs invidious

In the series 'words almost spelled the same and almost mean the same thing, but are not'

Insidious and invidious.

They both sound bad. One sounds like...well the other does, too. But they are distinct.

That snake slithering up towards you unannounced? Insidious. Shaking a snake in your face? Invidious. Both are pretty mean. Insidious is stealthy or under the radar. Invidious is plain ill will.

Insidious describes something that lies in wait to get you, and invidious is something offensive or defamatory. Cancer can be insidious, lurking in your body without your knowing it. Invidious doesn't hide; it's hateful right away.

Insidious didn't fall too far from the tree – it comes directly from the Latin word insidious meaning "deceitful, cunning, artful," from insidiae "plot, snare, ambush." That's pretty unannounced. Something insidious can even be attractive while doing harm, like an insidious plot to befriend your crush's girlfriend, so you can break them up. But often it's not attractive, just sneaky.

Invidious on the other hand is from the same place as envy. But it has slid over to mean just plain ill-will, where envy might come in but is not necessary.

You can be invidious in an insidious manner (being sneaky about your distaste for the other). But I think insidious carries enough negative feeling in there that it already includes the attributes of invidiousness.

More Star Trek Tech Progress

In a previous post, I listed a number of science fiction technologies used in the original Star Trek series and the progress our current society has made towards making them real. I also commented on how quickly we might achieve them.

I was just watching some reruns the other day...sorry, let me rephrase that in contemporary language in ephemeral tech language... I was watching a few of them them on Netflix (how long will the tech assumptions behind that phrasing last) and I realized that I had left out a number of things, some very obvious, some that seem like throwaways now. They are hidden, outside of the script but somehow mostly necessary assumptions for the plot.

- needle-less injections - Someone needs to be sedated? They're writhing in distress? With the 'hypospray' (which I suppose is hyperdermic), no need to be restrained when you don't have to find a vein. Just inject them without a needle via some transcutaneous mesh.

In some sense, the current transdermal patch effectively delivers chemicals to the blood stream but has its own limitations. Both aren't particularly effective for medications that need to be administered directly to the bloodstream for quick systemic dispersal (putting a bolus in your butt is slower release to the blood stream).

- earth diseases entirely solved, alien ones solvable in days with at-hand tech - every other episode someone contracts an alien disease. The other episodes some one is phasered in the face or breaks a leg, but they walk out of sick bay as chipper as ever. Medical science slowly does this, almost like this ST tech list, some things get solved perfectly (antibiotics?), some there's progress (chemotherapy), and some you solve well by cheating smart (colonoscopy screening). But in the show, any new unsolvable medical problem takes a long 48 suspenseful plot hours to solve.

- anti-gravity - elevators, walking on flat floors. That's just crazy. The only 'anti-gravity' is gravity from the other direction. But really, they need seat-belts even with anti-grav floors. For something like this which is technically impossible, a lot of tech cheating can go a long way

- deflector shields, force fields - a prison cell is fronted by it seems a painful invisible electric field. And the outside of the ship is protected from alien explosions (and the often forgotten cosmic particles and dust hit at interstellar speed). I presume if you can do this for a door way, you could do it for the outside of a ship so that the same tech would work for detention as well as protection.

- automatic pocket doors - doors are more privacy devices than security. They all seem to know when you're going to walk into any particular one otherwise like kids playing at the entrance to a grocery store, every single door would whoosh open as you walk along the hallway.

- bloop-bleep sounds - special futury sounds that alert you to danger or notification. These sounds were invented for the show (the communicator opening sound, the door opening whoosh).

Door opening sound
Red Alert
Tricorder scanning

OK, these are just fun. They're pretty much 1960's '101 Fun Experiments with Transistors!!'.

- the real time vital stats monitor - this is entirely doable, or even done, today. Maybe just badly. We can totally do this now. Get those ST set designers to work on the UX for the ICU/OR patient monitors!

Maybe the fancy scifi bit is in not having loads of tubes all trailed all over your body. That's practically possible now with bluethooth wireless.

- 'subspace' communication - this is very inarticulately presented in the shows. Sometimes they can communicate instantaneously over long distances, sometimes it is just somewhat faster than the ship. The physics of this is unclear to me. Somehow I expect that for the ability to transfer knowledge, there is some physics theorem that says that it is restricted by the same principles as the speed of light (i.e. if you could transfer knowledge that fast, you could have consequences (I don't know!) that would be equivalent to faster-than-light travel.

(oh almost forgot, bluetooth earpiece, pfft done that already)

Frankly there is so much in the original series that I'm sure I've missed even some big ones.
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Much of these imaginations were on purpose, but then some were just natural tweaks (needleless injection) or even unconscious assumptions (antigravity).

As an aside, social progress is interesting to watch, both in the invented extended world timeline of ST (TOS, TNG, DS9, Voy, Ent) and the real one. It's almost grating how tin-eared white-male-centered TOS appears now in comparison to the less presumptuous later series. Ent itself isn't as embarrassing as TOS even though Archer is (again the captain) an alien-femalizer and his two male subordinates are always whooping it up with the brosplaining... ok maybe it is intentionally embarrassing (but Ent is only 150 years in the future, 150 years behind TOS you'd think there'd be a little more progress)?

I'm so sorry, Clippy

Clippy was Microsoft's 'intelligent' assistant that they added way back to MS Office 97.

Holy crap is that goofy looking! And those animated eyebrows were even goofier! And then he'd ask you really annoying questions like "Do you need help with that?" to things you don't need! Gah!

That was the general reaction. Clippy was universally mocked. Reviled. Other bad things.

But really, was it so bad?

Lately (20 years later) it seems that everyday a new 'assistant' is coming out. Siri, Cortana, Alexa, chatbots up the wazoo. Clippy asked you more questions, based on what you were doing and had answered already, just like a good chatbot. You didn't write to it natural language, but the intention was the same, help out the user by asking questions back and forth.

It was context dependent (Siri is not). It followed a decision tree to maintain context (most current chatbots have trouble with context). It doesn't use speech (like S/C/A) or even typed natural language (chatbots), but it was still an assistant to do things you weren't sure about doing.

Clippy didn't try to do NLP, but frankly the non-speech part of S/C/A and chatbots, just the text, is mostly picking out keywords using hardcoded scripts, not terribly different from hardcoded trees.

So what was so bad about Clippy?

The idea was right, lead people through tasks they are unsure how to do. The implementation as decision trees was both easy and well integrated. What the decision trees helped with...well maybe that wasn't so great. I know I turned off Clippy immediately because I knew what I wanted to do (haha no comment people from twenty years ago!).

But was that the main problem?

I believe the main problem was... the first thing I said, the superficially distasteful graphic and its smarmy animation. It wasn't with the suggestions (though those may have been too simple) it wasn't the use case (helping to write a letter) which was surely too simplistic, but it was just never pursued (unlike the more popular and well-deserved complaints about MS PowerPoint's Auto Content Wizard, a not too dissimilar concept to the assistant).

The problem was the front face of the feature. A weird laughable graphic. I'm sure the idea team thought it was cute and would draw people in with its informality. Fashion is hard to gauge. But the universal response of cringing was no fashion statement. It's hard for those people inside the design team/the makers to see what outsiders see. And sometimes organizations can be too...polite (I know I know, crazy. Sometimes people just don't tell you what they really think).

The major lesson of Clippy is that when designing an assistant/chatbot,  first avoid smarmy (and get honest opinions). The second, which is not a lesson that people normally take from Clippy because they already turned it off because of the first point, is to make the assistant relevant (I know that's a bit broad). That is, make it help people with things they really want. SOmetimes wording makes a big difference "Do you want help writing a letter?" Of course not , I know exactly what I'm going to say to that lawyer! "Do you want help formatting a proper legal letter?" Oh. Right. Yes. Where does the return address and salutation and letterhead go? Yes, that is what people want to be asked for and helped with. So even the subtlest wording can make a difference. The third lesson? Remember the context of prior questions. It just makes things easier for a human.

But what really killed Clippy? Just the graphic. Nothing else, whether substantive or not, really came into play.