Google Home Page

I was just reading a programming blog when I came across Google Home Page, a new (to mee at least) google gift.

I’ve been setting up my googalized home page and it’s really cool: fast, inuitive and stuffed.

Great job google!

Natural Language and the Fencepost error

 

Quickly: if you are to build a fence 100 feet long, how many posts do you need?

If you said 10, welcome to the club (…no, is not 10, is 11).  This kind of mistake is so common that it has a name: the fencepost error, and as it turns out, natural language gives you enough ambiguity to let you fall into this one all you want. Take the followings for instance:

Our daughter Brisa turned 3 on November 10, and from the moment she turned 1, we feed her with a special milk for small kids. When she turned 3, my wife and I concluded that she shouldn’t drink that milk anymore. Why? because the label read “for children of ages 1 to 3″

We concluded wrong.. and yes, obviously (easy to say that know), since if we started when she turned one we should stop when she turns four, not three.

But this isn’t our fault… Why? well, because if I were to write the age range mathematically I would have done it like this: “[1,4)”. Now of course no one would ever buy my milk in that case, so thanks god there is natural language.

Natural language, unlike scientific language, is highly context dependent. Is even impressive that we are able to communicate with it at all (yea, I know what you’re thinking).. for instance, if a temperature range says “is OK to have from 35 to 37 degrees”.. does it means that 37.9999 is OK too? maybe.. I wouldn’t know.

Language lawyers would say that conventionally, when a range is given by a pair of natural numbers, the end is implied to extend up to the next number without including it ,whenever it makes sense (and it doesn’t if we are speaking of oranges). Fair enough.

But my wife and I aren’t conventional people.

Hello world! … and beyond (you never know)

This is my personal blog, where I’ll write about Things that Matters (to me of course)

See you around!