Fungible Convictions

Lindsay and I picked a couple Evos on Friday with a great deal reupping my old Sprint plan to a family plan, with unlimited data. Hence, this first-ever mobile post.

Thanks to Alan, Jade, and others for initial app recommendations…the Boston bus map realtime app is astounding. I can watch the #77 bus from my window at the same time the icon passes home on the app’s map. If I had that in 2008, I might have literally stayed at Tufts a few months longer instead of applying for new jobs near reliable T stops.

Of course now I get to work with people who make the apps, so it’s a good deal all around.

Anyway, we’re both geeking out. Or as my now-working-in-Silicon-Valley sister-in-law said Friday: “Welcome to 2006!”

I tried KGB for the first time tonight, and it looks like the whole thing is automated using a semantic language program (similar to how Ask.com worked).

Here in Boston there’s an commercial running where an auto dealer will pay the first year of a lease if the temperature at Logan Airport reaches 96 degrees this Labor Day. I wanted to see what the chances of that happening are, so I texted KGB “What’s the hottest Labor Day on record at Boston’s Logan Airport?” KGB’s reply was, “The highest temperature ever recorded in Boston, MA was 107 degrees Fahrenheit on Aug 2 1975.”

So KGB ignored two key parts of the question that a human would see—that I’m asking specifically about Logan Airport and specifically about Labor Day—leaving me to think a computer is doing the answering, at least initially. (There’s a third part, “on record,” that’s more or less redundant.)

When I replied that they didn’t answer the question, they followed up with an acknowledgment that they couldn’t find the answer and they were issuing me a credit for the $0.99 charge per answer. It’s a little disappointing overall, because there is an answer—KGB staff would simply have to click 122 times (the first official Labor Day in Boston was in 1887) through a page like this one at Weather Undergound. KGB just wasn’t interested in spending the time it takes to look it up.

I went ahead and did it. The answer to “What’s the hottest Labor Day on record at Boston’s Logan Airport?” is 94 degrees in 1928*. So if you’re thinking of leasing a car with Pride Motors of Lynn, Massachusetts, don’t do it just because you think you might get a year free.

* Temperature records at Logan go back to 1920, and the airport itself opened in 1923, making ’23 the latest possible year applicable to the question.