IT APPEARS that on at least one occasion recently, I have referred to something called the “Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies”. I may even have done this twice.
Perhaps – God forgive me – it has been a habit, because there is a hint of exhausted forbearance in the e-mail I received from one Ian Elliott. “Please, please, please,” he says, “it is the Dublin Institute FOR Advanced Studies!” Fair enough. My head is bowed in shame as I write this. Although even while bowing, it’s also wondering a little resentfully why the Institute should be “for” rather than “of”, anyway.
We can assume that, barring its takeover by luddites or creationists, it will never be the Dublin Institute AGAINST Advanced Studies. And besides, while there may a certain ambiguity in the “OF” version – implying that Advanced Studies spawned the Institute, rather than vice versa – is that not to some extent true? A separate question, perhaps arising from my limited understanding of the Einsteinian universe as championed by DIAS, is whether the chronologically linear relationship inferred by the “FOR” version – an implication that the establishment of the Institute definitely came first and that its studies followed, as cause and effect – has any sound basis.
Wasn’t Einstein the man who, consoling the bereaved widow of a former colleague, said that to “believing physicists”, the difference between past, present and future was nothing but “a stubbornly persistent illusion”? But enough excuses. The Dublin Institute For Advanced Studies it is. I stand corrected, still bowing.
ANYWAY, it could have been worse, a fact underlined by an e-mail from another physics person, Alison Hackett, on the topic of that threat to science, human decency, and civilisation in general: the predictive text facility of mobile phones.
It’s not just at CERN, Alison points out, that there have been problems locating the Higgs boson. Type the word “boson” into a text message, she says, and certain phones will automatically assume it’s something else you’re looking for instead. If you’re in a hurry and you unthinkingly accept the prompt then, before you know it, you may have informed colleagues that, using vastly expensive microscopic equipment, you have spent the day attempting to “observe bosoms”.
And that’s not the worst. I’m also told that the innocuous scientific question, “was the material porous?” becomes, on certain phones, “was the material porn?”. And that the phrase “beam was turned on” becomes “Adam was turned on” (which is what observing bosoms can do to you, all right).
On another tack entirely, I’m informed that “cosmic rays” will sometimes be transformed into “Bosnia says”. So one can imagine the chaos this would cause in a sensitive experiment. Throw in the obvious potential for confusion between “Hertz” and “Herzogovina” and, well, you could make a complete Balkans of the thing very easily.
IT’S NOT ONLY physicists who have to put up with this, of course. A popular website called Damn You Auto Correct is devoted to collating the more egregious misprompts and their effects on human relationships. The perceived treachery of phones is a common theme in the contributions. Indeed, it’s not unusual for the people involved to suspect that their mobiles are possessed by evil spirits of some kind.
Thus the man who texted one of his offspring with the cheerful message “your mom and I are going to divorce next month”, provoking the panicked reaction “what??? why! call me please”, before the sender realised his phone had autocorrected the word “Disney” in the intended message.
Or the woman who, reassuring her friend about the intentions of a mutual male acquaintance, and meaning to use the word “future”, instead texted: “Seriously [. . .] he told me the other day that you’re the first girl he had ever thought about the führer with. Xx.” Or the young female who, attempting to say that she was “chilling with my grandparents’” informed her aghast boyfriend that she was “chilling with my grannypanties” instead.
Not all the examples quoted are the result of auto-corrections. Some are mere typos, as thumbs – especially large male thumbs – struggle to press those tiny buttons as intended: occasionally hitting an L instead of a P, like the man who assured his wife that he’d already “laid the babysitter”.
But the design of the qwerty keyboard, juxtaposing as it also does the letters B and V, is not just a male problem. Witness the example, also quoted on DYAC, of the woman who, having passed a security check, texted: “Wow. They didn’t even open up my vag. They just squished it a little.” Such pitfalls are the price we pay for instantaneous communications. Not that misunderstandings caused by printing technology are a new thing. They’ve been around since at least 1631, when a famous edition of the Bible – auto-corrected by Satan himself, perhaps – omitted the crucial middle word in the commandment usually written as: “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery”. All told, the ease of modern communications is probably worth the occasional embarrassment when, instead of texting someone that you’re “in a restaurant” you announce you’re “in a restraint” instead.
And the odd mistake, at least, can be felicitous. Like the day I was meeting someone for lunch recently, in the Stephen’s Green area of Dublin, and she text-suggested the “National Concept Hall” as a venue. It struck me since that such a hall could be a very useful addition to the city’s infrastructure. Maybe the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies would pursue the idea further?