Gooey

The particular area of technology I specialize in is called HCI, an unfortunately unpronounceable acronym for human-computer interaction. This refers to understanding and designing the way people use computers, so that inept users don’t slow the computers down too much.

The Association for Computer Machinery (itself a weirdly named organization!) reversed the first two letters, so that its special interest group on interaction is called CHI. This is usually pronounced simply ki, to rhyme with “pie.” Some prefer to pronounce CHI as if it were a Greek letter, sounding like someone having to greet a colleague while in the middle of gagging. And I suppose others pronounce it like “chai,” the spicy tea.

But even the term “computer” is becoming obsolete. Or, more accurately, redundant. Everything’s a computer these days … phones … GPSes … cameras … come to think of it, everything’s a phone. But seriously, “computer” includes just about every consumer product. So really, it’s HTI … human-technology interaction.

Then the Association for Computing Machinery (and Its Users?) can call it THI.

Collision Course

Forget global warming, the polar ice caps melting, and the Celtics getting knocked out of the playoffs. We’ve got real problems. Scientists now predict that the entire Milky Way is going to collide with another galaxy, the Andromeda. That’s right! Galaxies … those things that are supposed to be comfortably far, far away, are on a collision course! This will happen in about four billion years, give or take a few millennia. Given our track record for procrastinating, we’d better start planning right away.

Now the first thing to keep in mind is that galaxies are made up of jillions¹ of stars like our sun. So we should start stockpiling the SPF 1,000,000 sun block.

Another problem is that we’re going to have a whole new set of constellations. Instead of the familiar Gemini, the twins, and Orion, the hunter, we’ll have things like The Wi-Fi Chip and The Newton-Raphson Method Illustrated Graphically.

It may not matter, however, since with so many suns, it may never get dark enough to see constellations. We’ll have to seriously ramp up coffee production. But at least it may mean the end of vampire movies.

Of course, by then we might have evolved into incorporeal beings, disembodied intelligence floating around in space. In that case, please disregard the above.


¹Of course, “jillion” is a made up number. Actual numbers have serious sounding names, like googolplex.