Occasionally I’ll crowdsource, as it were, a childhood memory. I was born and grew up in Oshawa, Ontario, living there between 1957 and 1976. Other than brief work-related stays from December 1983 to September 1984, and again from June to September 1992, I haven’t lived there since 1976, some 46 years ago. So when I needed help recalling a particular used and rare books dealer, my go-to place for research was the private Facebook group Vintage Oshawa, which has about 19,400 members and describes itself as “a place to post pictures, memorabilia & share tales of Oshawa past (pre-1980).” After all, 19,400 heads might be better than one in this case, I reasoned. And I had success almost four years ago back in May 2018 when I asked in classic Facebook style “who remembers” Rose Bowl Fish and Chips that operated at the corner of Bond and Prince streets? More than 200 members of the group either liked the question or responded with a comment.
How we consolidate, access and sometimes geographically transpose locations in long-term memory is a complex process beyond the ken of my knowledge of neuroscience, but here is what I asked earlier today based on what I suspected to be a real but perhaps flawed memory:
“Does anyone recall a used bookstore on Division Street in Oshawa in the 1970s and 1980s, not far from the old General Motors North Plant? Brown brick, I think, like other buildings in the neighbourhood. A bit dingy in terms of lighting inside but not without its charms. I think the name might have started with the letter M, but it was all quite a while ago. Given that we’re talking about 40 or 50 years ago, it’s also possible I’ve conflated the idea of a bookstore on Division Street in the area of the GM North Plant with a health food/Asian vegetable market store in that location and the bookstore was on the west side of Simcoe Street South, near John Street East, not far south of a Pepi’s Pizza location on that corner. I still have fond, though distant memories of my friend Mike Byrne, working there as a cook in high school circa 1973-74, and wrangling his friends the odd late-night pie … the pepperoni pizza … greasy, yes, sure. But superb also.
The mention of Pepi’s Pizza was perhaps not essential to answering the question, given the focus is on a bookstore and Asian grocery store, but mentioning a favourite childhood eatery in Oshawa, be it Pepi’s or Mother’s Pizza Parlour and Spaghetti House, or perhaps Red Barn or Burger Chef, always is a good memory prompt for any even tangentially related story I’ve found as a writer.
So what did I learn today from folks in Vintage Oshawa? When I said, I think the name might have started with the letter M,” turns out I was correct as dozens of readers spelled it out for me as Morgan Self, which I instantly knew as correct. But commenters went well beyond that in their help. Apparently, there were two Morgan Selfs who were proprietors of their … err … self-named bookstore, father and son. And they lived on Shakespeare Avenue another commenter noted (their bookstore was at 84 Simcoe St. S.) Now, I confess my fact-checking skills as a blogger aren’t perhaps as well-honed as they had to be as a pre-Google and pre-Wikipedia copy editor on the rim at daily newspapers, but I just had to Google Shakespeare Avenue to make sure this was by the book and there was such a street in Oshawa (I didn’t recall it) and I wasn’t being audaciously pranked on social media prior to April 1. Turns out to be legit. There is such a street. Whether the book-selling Selfs lived on it would take more verification for a newspaper back in the day, but for us present-day bloggers, not so much. Editors in their day were the last-line-of-defence fact checkers. When you wear a writer’s hat, you are a storyteller and there’s an admonition that a writer should never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. This was true even before 2017 when Sean Spicer came along and elevated the notion to high principle. That said, the photograph accompanying this post is admittedly for illustration purposes only. It is not the inside of the long-gone Morgan Self bookstore in Oshawa. At least I think it’s not.
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Tag Archives: Memory
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but beware the Ghost of Christmas Eve newsroom Baileys Irish Cream liqueur
In response to a query, I wrote here yesterday about my usual Christmastime traditions over the years, and how some of my traditions date back many years, while others are of much more recent vintage, and are perhaps best described as being on the road to becoming tradition, although exactly where that demarcation line is drawn, is not completely clear to me. Christmas traditions are important, but not immutable, I think. To some extent, they seem to me to be dependent on where we are both in life, as it were, and geography, which even in a very virtual world, still matters.
While I touched on food, be it sausage meat dressing or stuffing for Jeanette’s perfectly cooked juicy Christmas turkey, Land O’Lakes sour cream cornbread, Christmas fruitcake, whether it be from the monks of Le Magasin de l’Abbayea Val Notre-Dame in Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec, or my local Safeway’s honey and ground almond marzipan-icing topped offerings; as well as the classic Christmas movie genre, I might well have added a few more traditions I developed over the years that festively often blended the personal and professional, private and public.
Ecclesiastes (hello Qoheleth, hello King Solomon?) had it about right, I think, when whosoever he was wrote, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” In terms of the Christmas season for many that means travelling long miles only to be thrust together in close quarters with other annually seasonally-close family members and friends who hold somewhat different cultural, political, sports or even religious beliefs than you do. In terms of the latter, this happens even among Christians, hard as that may be to believe, marking the birth of our saviour some 2,000-plus years ago in Bethlehem – or is it Nazareth? Take your pick. The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth.
As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for the latter two and settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, published in November 2012, wrote Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed because the entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation by a sixth-century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus, or in English, Dennis the Small.
Fast-forward a couple of thousand years and it is Christmas 1996. I am working as the managing editor of The Kingston Net-Times, during the pioneering days of Canadian online journalism. From day one, we published no print edition and our local stories in that groundbreaking digital newspaper were updated on the fly throughout the day, but there were few bells and whistles, as very, very few of our online readers had cable broadband internet in 1996. Who remembers dial-up?
On Christmas Day 1996, I was called at home by a father who read us online and wondered if we could take a few minutes to put up the famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” letter to the editor and the editorial response for his young daughter.
The letter and editorial had long been in the public domain. So we did. On Christmas Day. Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote the long-ago letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial.
The following year at Christmas 1997, I was back in Peterborough, Ontario at the Peterborough Examiner, a print-only daily newspaper back in those days, where I had worked previously from 1985 to 1989. During my first stint, I was the court beat reporter. Now, I was the city hall reporter. The Examiner, of course, was the paper Robertson Davies edited between 1942 and 1955. It was while editing the Peterborough Examiner that Davies, considered by townspeople as an eccentric bearded figure in the small-town world of Peterborough in the 1940s, would establish himself as one of Canada’s most important 20th century literary figures with the creation and development of his Samuel Marchbanks character, mining his daily newspaper experiences in the Queen of the Kawarthas for many of the characters and situations, which would appear in his novels and plays.
On Dec. 23, 1997, I was at a dinner party hosted by the late playwright Rhonda Payne at her home on Parkhill Road East in Peterborough. I had met Rhonda, author of the play “Stars in the Sky Morning,” a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, a month earlier at Karen Hicks – at another dinner party. The National Post described Rhonda in 1999 as a “national treasure” and if ever there was a bon vivant, it was Rhonda, which is why the evening was so convivial and is perhaps what induced me to have more red wine at dinner than I might normally during the work week. You see, the Examiner had a long tradition of its own of granting employees what was quaintly termed “early leaving” at noon on both Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. What’s an extra glass, or maybe even two, of red, I thought to myself? Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and really, how hard can it be? All I have to do is more or less physically show up in the newsroom for the half-day morning.
When I got home from Rhonda’s dinner party that night, the red light was flashing repeatedly and rapidly on my old General Electric answering machine (I think voicemail existed, but was still in its early years). It seemed odd to have so many messages awaiting receipt, but I went ahead and pushed the play button. Lo and behold it was Jim Hendry, then city editor of the Examiner, telling me that there was going to be a press conference at 8 a.m. Dec. 24 at the Peterborough County courthouse with City of Peterborough and County of Peterborough officials on hand to answer questions about the province seizing welfare files earlier in the day on Dec. 23. Many of the details are blurry after 22 years, but I believe welfare was perhaps a shared city-county municipal responsibility in those days, and the province was intent on upsetting that apple cart through shifting responsibilities and financial obligations between the two entities in what was called “downloading” in the days of the Harris government.
I barely survived the press conference. Once back in the second-floor newsroom of the old Peterborough Examiner building at Hunter and Water streets, I quickly picked up the telephone on my desk, across from Jack Marchen, then the court reporter, to give the late Ron Chittick, then chief administrative officer of the City of Peterborough, a quick call before he vanished for Christmas, as I realized back in the office I had a couple of unanswered questions still. Jack Marchen had been sitting across the desk from me in the newsroom when I left in August 1989 and he was still sitting across the desk from me when I returned. Phil Tyson, who sat beside me when I left, was also sitting beside me when I returned.
Time elapsed had foolishly led me to forget one of Jack’s Christmas traditions, which I should have remembered from the 1980s. But eight years had passed since then and there had been the dinner party the previous evening. Jack, unofficially, of course, and off-the-record, if anyone asks, traditionally would walk around the newsroom the morning of Christmas Eve, a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream liqueur and white Styrofoam coffee cups in hand, to pass out some Christmas cheer to his friends and colleagues.
I’m not sure what I was thinking, or even if I was thinking, but I happily accepted my coffee cup full of Baileys, as Jack handed it to me, which in all fairness kind of looked like a cup of coffee for those like myself, who go heavy on the cream. I slugged it back in one gulp, which does in retrospect seem kind of odd if I actually thought it might be hot coffee, and my brain froze instantaneously – mid-sentence, mid-question to Ron. For a thirty-second eternity, or so it seemed, there was dead air on the phone line as I failed to articulate the remainder of the question I was posing to Ron.
That, friends, was tradition and Christmas Eve 1997.
A decade later, editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News weekly newspapers here in Northern Manitoba, I resumed publishing the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” letter to the editor from 2007 to 2013, below a bold-faced and italicized introduction, which read:
“Editor’s note: Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial. We, at the Thompson Citizen, are pleased to be part of that tradition and republishing it at Christmas has become an annual hallmark of the festive season for us here as well since Dec. 19, 2007. Merry Christmas, one and all.
John Barker.”
You can read it in full here at: https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/editorial/yes-virginia-there-is-a-santa-claus-1.1367424
While at the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I also much enjoyed re-printing Garwood Robb’s “A special gift from years ago” as a guest “Soundings” column on the editorial page around Christmas. It opens: “My first teaching assignment was in Thompson in 1968. Mary was a student of mine. She was from an extremely poor and dysfunctional family who lived on the edge of town about a quarter mile from the town’s railway station.
“On the last day of school before Christmas holidays many of the students brought me gifts….”
The column was first published in the Grandview Exponent, which serves the communities of Grandview and Gilbert Plains in the Parkland region of Manitoba, on Dec. 20, 2005, and later republished in Garwood Robb’s blog, “In My Own Words,” which can be found online at either: http://garwood2009.blogspot.ca/2009/12/memory-from-long-agorevisited.html or https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/columnists/soundings-1.1360060
Garwood lived on Centennial Drive East in Thompson and taught at Westwood Elementary School from September 1968 to June 1972 when he moved to Winnipeg.
And while it is likely too soon to call it a tradition, I’ve become rather fond in recent years of re-posting on Facebook at least two YouTube videos: “Mog’s Christmas Calamity,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuRn2S7iPNU&feature=share) based on author and illustrator Judith Kerr’s Mog, who first appeared in the book “Mog the Forgetful Cat,” in 1970, and who falls asleep on Christmas Eve, and unwittingly creates unimaginable chaos, leading the Thomas family to fear that Christmas will have to be cancelled, and Igniter Media’s “A Social Network Christmas,” an artistic take on how the story of the nativity might have read had a social network existed at the time of Jesus’s birth, which you will find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sghwe4TYY18
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Mandelaed: What if it never appeared on TV in Flash Gordon in the 21st or Buck Rogers in the 25th century?
Has metal bucket head man “Mandelaed” me?
What if metal bucket head man, as I like to think of him, never actually appeared in the 25th century Buck Rogers black and white TV series in 1950 or 1951, or in 1954 or 1955 in an episode of Flash Gordon from the 21st century?
What if … none of it was real, or at least that there was no metal bucket head man (it’s hard to describe the appearance of the character exactly, but over his head, if he had one, or in lieu of one if he didn’t, appeared to be something reminiscent of one of those upside down old silver metal wash pails or buckets, yet the rest of him looked more humanoid than like a robot, although he didn’t speak in either case), but I remembered him from my childhood as real?
Well, never fear, the explanation may simply be that I was mandelaed and am displaying a classic case of the “Mandela Effect,” as it is called, although in my case it may or may not be a case of being privately mandelaed, rather than the collective misremembering of common events the phenomenon is usually identified with.
“This form of collective misremembering of common events or details first emerged in 2010, when countless people on the internet falsely remembered Nelson Mandela was dead,” notes Neil Dagnall, reader in applied cognitive psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, in a Feb. 12 piece in The Conversation, based in Toronto. “It was widely believed he had died in prison during the 1980s. In reality, Mandela was actually freed in 1990 and passed away in 2013 – despite some people’s claims they remember clips of his funeral on TV.”
Paranormal consultant Fiona Broome, discussing the possibility of alternate memories and alternate realities, was one of the two people who coined the phrase “Mandela Effect” during a conversation in Dragon Con‘s “green room” in late 2009 to explain this collective misremembering, and then “other examples started popping up all over the internet,” Dagnall says. “For instance, it was wrongly recalled that C-3PO from Star Wars was gold, actually one of his legs is silver. Likewise, people often wrongly believe that the Queen in Snow White says, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall.’ The correct phrase is “magic mirror on the wall.”
In an Oct. 13, 2016 article, BuzzFeed staff writer Christopher Hudspeth, lists 20 examples of the Mandela Effect, ranging from the common misspelling of Oscar Mayer, the famous brand of hot dogs and lunch meat, as Oscar Meyer, to the Monopoly board game mascot, Rich Uncle Pennybags, having a monocle, when he doesn’t.
In a similar vein, as I wrote here in a March 25, 2015 post headlined “If there was a biblical equivalent to a mondegreen, it might well be the famous 45th verse from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/if-there-was-a-biblical-equivalent-to-a-mondegreen-it-might-well-be-the-famous-45th-verse-from-the-fifth-chapter-of-the-gospel-of-st-matthew/) when you “mishear the lyrics to a song it is called a mondegreen, which is a sort of aural malapropism. Instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word. The word mondegreen is generally used for misheard song lyrics, although technically it can apply to any speech. A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning.” Hudspeth cites the example of “We Are the Champions” by Queen where “many of those familiar with the song remember the final lyrics being ‘No time for losers, ’cause we are the champions … of the world!’ Guess what? There is no ‘of the world!’ The song just ends, and it’s driving people crazy because they feel 100% sure that they’ve heard otherwise in the past.”
Broome explains the Mandela Effect s differences arising from movement between parallel realities (the multiverse). This is based on the theory that within each universe alternative versions of events and objects exist.
“Broome also draws comparisons between existence and the holodeck of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, writes Dagnall. “The holodeck was a virtual reality system, which created recreational experiences. By her explanation, memory errors are software glitches. This is explained as being similar to the film The Matrix.”
Broome has described the Mandela Effect this way: “The ‘Mandela Effect’ is what happens when someone has a clear, personal memory of something that never happened in this reality.
“Many people – mostly total strangers – seem to remember several of the exact same events with the exact same details. However, those memories are different from what’s in history books, newspaper archives, and so on.”
Other theories propose that the Mandela Effect is evidence of changes in history caused by time travellers.
The X-Files, appropriately enough, had a fine real-time nod to fake news and the Trumpocalypse, while at the same time staying campy and conspiratorially self-referential in its treatment of the Mandela Effect this year in season 11, episode four, “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” which aired Jan. 24. Writes Brian Tallerico on Vulture, the culture and entertainment site from New York magazine: “We’re introduced to the Mandela effect through the story of Reggie Something, played by Brian Huskey. We meet him in full Deep Throat mode, chewing sunflower seeds in a parking garage, having a clandestine meeting with Mulder. He knows he’s going to seem crazy, so he gives Mulder a very personal example of the Mandela effect, revealing to him that his favorite episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Lost Martian,” doesn’t really exist. Of course, we know it doesn’t, but Mulder is convinced that he saw it when he was a kid. He rummages through his belongings to find it, leading to the great line when Scully suggests it might be a different series: “Confuse The Twilight Zone with The Outer Limits?! Do you even KNOW ME?!?!”
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The Internet of Things … things like ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing
A few weeks ago, I happened to capture from television for my PVR, an airing of the 1983 movie War Games, starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Woods and Ally Sheedy. War Games is a delightful, campy end-of-the-Cold War Ronald Reagan-era science fiction film, which didn’t seem quite so campy when I first saw it at a movie theatre in Cornwall, Ontario, the year the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on a scheduled flight from New York City to Seoul, after the flight deviated from its approved route and flew through prohibited airspace near Sakhalin Island at the far eastern extreme of the Soviet Union.
Perestroika and Glasnost, as it turned out, were just around the corner, but not quite yet arrived. Broderick plays David Lightman, a young computer hacker who unwittingly accesses WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), a United States military supercomputer originally programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Lightman gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation, originally believing it to be a computer game. The computer, now tied into the nuclear weapons control system and unable to tell the difference between simulation and reality, attempts to start World War III.
Flash-forward 34 years from War Games to WannaCry.
WannaCry?
Yes. Not because I am one of the unfortunates with a computer infected May 12 with WannaCry, which appears a dozen years after the first documented ransomware attack happened in the United States in 2005.
Rather cry because of the State of the Internet itself in 2017. That should make anyone, Bitcoin pirates excepted, want to cry. If ever their was a swamp needing to be drained, it’s the Internet (so ubiquitous The Associated Press stopped capitalizing it last year), a tangled network that more or less runs the world from up in the Cloud somewhere, while making cyberwar on us down below through a deluge of ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing targeting our computer vulnerabilities; with the words ransomware, malware, spam and phishing so common now in the public lexicon, they no longer challenge my spellchecker and I no longer need to define them.
WannaCry, also known as Wanna Decryptor, WanaCryptor, or wcry, is a specific self-replicating multilingual ransomware type of viral worm malware program that prevents or limits users from accessing their system by encrypting all their data except for two files: instructions on what to do next and the Wanna Decryptor program itself.
It is believed to exploit a vulnerability in older and unpatched Microsoft Windows operating systems to invisibly move from computer-to-computer. And unlike many other forms of malware, it can spread on its own: it doesn’t need a human to click on a fake e-mail attachment. WannaCry uses a hacking tool called the Eternal Blue exploit, believed to have been developed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to give American intelligence operative access to computers used by terrorists and enemy states. But a mysterious organization called Shadow Brokers, which first came to public attention last year, claimed last month it had stolen a “cyber weapon” of that description from an American spy agency, and dumped it on the Internet for all and sundry to use.
Once installed and the software is locked, WannaCry demands a US$300 ransom to be paid within six hours in Bitcoins, a digital computer cryptocurrency created in 2009 by an unknown person or persons using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, to decrypt the files.
The ransom note indicates that the payment amount will be doubled after three days. If payment is not made after seven days, the encrypted files will be deleted. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the Helsinki-based cybersecurity company F-Secure, called the May 12 global attack, which has affected hundreds of thousands of files in more than 100 countries by early counts, “the biggest ransomware outbreak in history.” Bitcoins are encrypted to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds in a decentralized way, operating independently of a central bank, and placing Bitcoin over the last eight years usually beyond the reach of regulatory restriction and confiscation. A single Bitcoin is worth about US$1,734, which is about $500 more than a troy ounce of gold will set you back at around US$1,230.
A decade ago, if you weren’t trolling sketchy sites, knowingly or unknowingly, and had a half-decent firewall and anti-virus program, odds were you could manoeuvre around the Internet OK, plagued by little more than some annoying, but hardly crippling, e-mail spam. Today, for this WordPress blog, I use Akismet,which bills itself as “an advanced hosted anti-spam service aimed at thwarting the underbelly of the web. It efficiently processes and analyzes masses of data from millions of sites and communities in real time. To fight the latest and dirtiest tactics embraced by the world’s most proficient spammers, it learns and evolves every single second of every single day. Because you have better things to do.” Akismet heitpfully tells me it has “protected your site from 11,379 spam comments already.”
If you were an Apple loyalist, working on a Mac, viruses were almost unheard of a decade ago, especially when compared to Microsoft Windows, first released in 1995. Apple Macintosh computer users still are less likely to be infected with a virus than Microsoft Windows users, but as Apple gains market share and Macs are used by more people, virus infections are becoming more common than they used to be.
I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the Internet “arrived.”
When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.
I remember using an Internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is their no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.
I remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California.
But in 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the Internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory” server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.
That said, I’m bit of a contrarian, and just as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, I decided I need a bit of a break from writing at odd hours in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, head of Mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960.
So what did I do? Well, I made a few trips that summer to nearby Sandbanks Provincial Park in Prince Edward County, Ontario’s only island county (alas now long linked across the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario to the mainland at Belleville by a bridge) but I also took along Clifford Stoll’s just published Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, where he discussed his ambivalence regarding the future of how the Internet will be used and suggests even then the promise of the Internet was vastly over-hyped by those with vested interests to do so. An American astronomer by trade, Stoll is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess, who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, which led to Stoll’s 1989 book called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, which I have also read. But I must confess I have not even attempted to tackle his 1980 PhD dissertation from the University of Arizona titled Polarimetry of Jupiter at Large Phase Angles, which I gather looked at cloud models and “Jupiter’s solar flux deposition profile.” Whatever that might mean.
While Stoll was wildly wrong in Silicon Snake Oil in underestimating the future of e-commerce and online news publishing, more than 20 years later the book still stands the test of time, I think, as a general cautionary tale about over-hyping the Internet and getting too carried away in our virtual enthusiasms.
Which is why the following year in 1996, as the managing editor of the pioneering Kingston Net-Times, I was, as I recall, urging my readers to follow Stoll’s suggestion to log-off the old dial-up modem mainly back then from time-to-time to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at least that’s what my memory recalls him writing) and to take in a kids’ hockey game at the local arena (my idea).
The publisher, who in all fairness, gave me great editorial latitude was a bit less holistic in his considered view. In fact, he was, truth be told, incredulous. He used the old-fashioned telephone to call me, rather than send an e-mail, and asked, “Did you really suggest people log-off?” It is possible several expletives followed in the next sentence when I assured him I had indeed. Fortunately, our online (is that irony?) readers loved the column, albeit a novel idea to most of them, and sent us e-mails to say so.
While the so-called “Internet of Things” is usually taken to mean the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data, perhaps the definition should be broadened to encompass things like ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing.
The only solution, at least how I see it, to virtual phishing may be to pull the plug and go fishing in real life.
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Google Search is a writer’s friend: Primo spell checker
For years now I’ve used Google Search as my go-to-spell checker on the internet for words that stump Microsoft Word’s spell checker (which is unfortunately a pretty low bar … “no spelling suggestions” and red underlined words are a pretty common occurrence. I may get one yet writing this sentence).
A spell checker is an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone, capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, e-mail client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.
“The spell checker scans the text and extracts the words contained in it, comparing each word with a known list of correctly spelled words (i.e. a dictionary). This might contain just a list of words, or it might also contain additional information, such as hyphenation points or lexical and grammatical attributes,” Wikipedia tells me.
“An additional step is a language-dependent algorithm for handling morphology. Even for a lightly inflected language like English, the spell-checker will need to consider different forms of the same word, such as plurals, verbal forms, contractions, and possessives. For many other languages, such as those featuring agglutination and more complex declension and conjugation, this part of the process is more complicated.”
Most of the time I do know how to spell the word triggering the red alert, but even my largely two-index fingers typing has a tendency to overrun my typing on the page when I am composing something quickly in my head, as I write (err … type), and sometimes it is just as fast, when it is more than one word, to copy-and-paste the sentence into Google Search rather than to individually correct several suspect words. Sometimes, of course, I correct the word in Word just to make sure I really do remember how to spell it. Sort of like doing math in your head, or at least on paper with a pen or pencil, rather than using a calculator. We pretty much all figure we should be able to do those things manually; we just don’t want to overdo it.
This got me thinking the other day, wondering why Google Search is so much better at correcting my spelling in sentences, almost as an afterthought, while it completes a search that may or may not be additionally helpful in and of itself. Google Search will often finish a sentence correctly for me, even if I only paste or type a part of the sentence into the search box or bar.
My first hunch was that it had something to do with the vast amount of data Google Search processes with over three billion searches a day, and developing algorithms and other proprietary tools based on that.
My second hunch was that if I was pondering this other people have thought about it, researched it, and likely written about it before me.
My intuition for both hunches turned out to be correct.
Intuition, in fact, is what Google Search is all about. What makes it intuitive? Context. Context rules.
John Breeden II, the Washington, D.C. chief executive officer of Tech Writers Bureau, who formerly was the laboratory director and senior technology analyst for Government Computer News (GCN), where he reviewed thousands of products aimed at the U.S. federal government – everything from notebooks to high-end servers – and at the same time decoded highly technical topics for broad audiences, wrote about the topic in an Nov. 18, 2011 article for GCN.
“My biggest problem with Word is that there are some words that simply trip it up,” Breeden wrote. “When writing about temperature for our many rugged reviews, I always put ‘Farenheight,’ which Word thinks should be changed to ‘Fare height.’ That doesn’t help at all.
“However, when the same misspelled word is pasted into Google, it says, ‘showing results for Fahrenheit instead.’ There are quite a few other words that confuse Word but not Google. They are not difficult to find.
“I have to wonder why Google is so smart when it comes to figuring out what word a user wants to use. My guess is that the database Google is pulling from is so massive that it’s probably seen a lot of the same basic spelling mistakes. There are probably a lot of people who have wanted to search for Fahrenheit but typed in ‘Farenheight’ instead. Nice to know that I’ve got company.
“You would think it would be simple for word processors to use the same type of technology to improve their accuracy, but I suppose that would involve capturing data from their users and then making the connections between common mistakes and the accurate spelling.
“I thought that is what spell check was supposed to do, but instead I think it just matches the misspelling with words that are somewhat close to what you’ve typed. And Google obviously goes beyond that to associate common mistakes with actual words.”
An anonymous poster at Quora, a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, wrote on Sept. 1, 2012 in response to the question, “How is google so good at correcting spelling mistakes in searches?”:
“Google (search engines in general) has clusters processing tons (TB’s) query logs, which try to learn the transformation from original misspelled sentence to the corrected one. These transformation schemes are fed into the front end servers which serve the auto completion (and/or corrections to queries). “Also these servers have lot more processing power and memory and disk space of course will not be an issue at all (for the learned transformations). “Also since Google crawls the entire web regularly it will learn new words and suggest corrections Word can’t do till next release.”
Quora also aggregates questions and answers to topics.
“Desktop software usually have tight constraints on processing power, memory or disk space they could use to run compared to that of server based applications and usually are expected to keep the internet usage to a minimum (at least for MS Word.) “They use static resources (dictionary that might only be current at the time of launch) and can’t employ complex algorithms due to the above said restrictions and hence employ heuristic algorithms which may not [be] very predictive of the correct word.”
Cosmin Negruseri, vice-president of engineering at Addepar, an investment management technology company, formerly worked at Google (both companies are based in Mountain View in Santa Clara County, California) as an engineer, working on ads, search and Google Code Jam, an international programming competition hosted and administered by Google, replied the same day, writing: “The main insight in modern spell correctors is using context. For example New Yorp is a misspelling of New York with a high probability.”
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