1. My car continues to send me messages. TIRE PRESSURE LOW. FILL WASHER FLUID. BOOK TIME FOR MAINTENANCE. TIME FOR REGULAR MAINTENANCE. STOP BUYING YARN.

  2. Sophie the Cat conflates loneliness with hunger. We tend to feed her in the morning and when we get home from work. I have been working on training her, and I think that she understands the words “hungry” and “petting.” If I ask, “Sophie, do you want petting?” she will jump on the couch and wait for me to pet her (if that’s what she wants). On the other hand, if I ask, “Sophie, do you want food?” she will run to the food dish (if that’s what she wants). I also think that she rubs the top of her head on my feet when she wants to be petted.

  3. The other day at work we had a “hackathon,” and my group worked on the first steps towards having the computer read aloud the content on the page. This is much harder for mathematical notation than it is for English words. It’s also harder when your product uses weird math notation with a home-grown parser so you can’t rely on MathML’s accessibility functions. We have taught the computer to say things like “hippopotamoose over the quantity two plus the variable x end quantity plus the fourth root of the variable x plus pink lightning end root.”

"hippopotamoose over the quantity two plus the variable x end quantity plus the fourth root of the variable x plus pink lightning end root"

We have not yet received a feature request for “demanding parent mode” in which the website would say things like “how could you not know that?” or “you are such a disappointment” or “why can’t you be more like your brother?”