Slashdot Mirror
Glimpse of Stephen Hawking's Computer
kenekaplan writes "Intel application engineer Travis Bonifield has been working closely with Hawking to communicate with the world for a decade. He's traveled from the United States to England every few years to hand-deliver Hawking a customized PC. Bonifield talks about the technology that powers the customized system."
Hawking's latest machine is a Thinkpad x220. Lately he's been trouble speaking due to weakened cheek muscles (down to one word per minute). New Scientist has a brief interview with Hawking's outgoing technician on the challenges he faced. It turns out Hawking is still using a DECtalk (despite some reports suggesting otherwise).
With a cat for scale. That's it, Wikipedia, we're through.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
So why the surprise that he still uses the DECTalk?
In this case if it is broke then someone probably will fix it.
At one word a minute, you get to really think about what you are gonna say.
Why the Dectalk hate? It served the world well for many many years and will for a lot longer than most people think.
"asking why someone uses a 30 year old electronic device when newer and therefore likely more capable options exist"
You should be asking - why someone WOULDN'T use a 30 year old device when it does everything they need it to do. Not everyone thinks upgrading for the sake of it is a worthwhile pursuit especially if its as critical as your only means to communicate.
Lately he's been trouble speaking due to weakened cheek muscles (down to one word per minute).
I see Slashdot's come up with a simple solution that just involves skipping words that don't seem necessary :)
Summation 2
None of us really recognise our recorded voice as our own even though we know it is so I guess thats not much of a surprise especially given that 30 years has passed in his case too. I'd be interested to know what Hawkings internal voice in his head sounds like - is it his original voice or is it his speech synthesizer?
Oh, look, it's just a clunky Lenovo laptop. Big whoop.
From the Telegraph link, we happily learn:
In an interview with the New Scientist magazine to mark his 70th birthday on Sunday, January 8, he was asked: "What do you think most about during the day?" to which he replied: "Women. They are a complete mystery."
Why does this story have the digital flag on it? Yeah, it involves DECTalk, but that's all it takes to make it about DEC? Had the story been DEC centric and about various DEC technologies, such as VAX, OpenVMS, Alpha, DECNET, Clustering or PDP, then I'd agree, and there could be an interesting (depending on one's POV) discussion about it. But since none of that is involved here, except DECTalk, how does that alone make this a story about DEC?
I have often wondered whether Hawkins has ever tried using dasher.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/
Occurs to me it is ideal for people with very little or no physical mobility
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/SpecialNeeds.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d6yIquOKQ0
Just a thought....
What does he do when US Customs decides to take his computer for a year of analysis? How the hell does he get by the TSA? Or is he just one of many influential people who avoid traveling to the USA?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
This opens up a million (bad) quantum mechanics Heisenberg Uncertainty principle jokes.
Women, either you're drunk, or they don't make any sense, never both at the same time (which is closer to a pauli exclusionary principle joke I guess)
or
something to do with their emotional state being an unknown quantity until the wavefunction collapses?
In Hawkings honor, any black hole thermodynamics jokes? I'm thinking something along the lines of every time a male makes a mistake that information never escapes past the female event horizon, or make something weird (even for me) involving sex, virtual particle emission, and childbirth?
As a closely related issue, everyone is aware that there exists "nerdy hiphop rap". But does anyone know of "nerdy stand up comedy"? Clearly this post shows I'm not cut out to blaze a trail thru that new genre, but the non-internet equivalent of /. +1 funny mod must exist for some sorta technical stand up comedian? I just want to hear someone say the F word 6 times per minute while saying something funny about microsoft, to laughing drunks, or something like that. The closest I can think of is some podcasts like "the phone show" by the PLA, but thats not quite it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
As I understand it, Hawking is limited to a single muscle effectively acting as a boolean switch.
Dasher, cool as it may be, requires more interaction than that.
I've tried Dasher years ago; the speed you can achieve is suprisingly high with a very short learning curve. Though I've never seen a practical application of it; it seems more like a proof-of-concept than an actual usable product.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The article says the company that made the synth is out of business, yet the wikipedia entry for DECtalk links to the company that owns the rights, and it looks like they still make an RT available for linux:
http://www.speechfxinc.com/dectalk_linux.php
The only nerd comedian I can think of at the moment is Dan Telfer, but I'm sure there are more.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
how many cats per library of congress?
Hmm... MC Chris, one of the "nerdcore" rappers, does standup lite at his shows. It's been about 4 years since I went to his show, but IIRC maybe a quarter of the whole show was comedy. He's like nerdcore for non-nerds though. Or a different type of nerd than the Slashdot nerd. I recall him going on and on with references to a movie called Goonies, which I have never seen and have barely heard of.
...about Stephen Hawking's personal life in two weeks. Not that he isn't a fascinating man, but with this much coverage I have to wonder if he's hired a new PR guy or something...
Has no one thought to give him an emotiv? It seems like he could even map out each letter or even words with one of those. http://emotiv.com/
Of those who read the article and watched the youtube videos (a small percentage, I know), was I the only one who was slightly disappointed to see the windows 7 logo come up on the screen when they turned it on?
Most bad comment made by Hawking at my sense. Lack of imagination and originality in this very used bad macho joke. But I guess everyone is supposed to find it cute since it's from Hawking.
Achille Talon
Hop!
What an astute observation... I wonder as well. Maybe someone out there will see this and get the courage up to ask him.
On a similar note: I have asked multi-lingual people which language they think in, and they have all said that they just go with whichever is more accurate, or sounds better. Like if they were primarily Spanish speaking, but also fluent in English, and they were thinking of the phrase "To be thrown out of a window" in Spanish (I am not even going to bother figuring out what it really is in Spanish, I could Google Translate, but then again, so could you), it would just be easier to use the English word "Defenestrate".
Why not set him up with a brain computer interface?. At its most basic level it should work as well if not better / faster then his cheek switch.
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
Slow down, white knight. Defending women on Slashdot isn't going to get you laid.
No Wi-Fi. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
If a monkey can control a robotic arm with 7 degrees of freedom http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnWSah4RD2E
http://singularityhub.com/2010/06/12/monkey-controls-robot-arm-with-7-degrees-of-freedom-video/
http://www.physorg.com/news194796581.html
you would think a brain implant would be a useful thing at this point for him. Yes it is a risk, but really, wouldn't it be worth it?
Like if they were primarily Spanish speaking, but also fluent in English, and they were thinking of the phrase "To be thrown out of a window" in Spanish (I am not even going to bother figuring out what it really is in Spanish, I could Google Translate, but then again, so could you), it would just be easier to use the English word "Defenestrate".
The Spanish word is "defenestrar". I suspect a better example would be something specific to a certain culture, e.g. "vihta" in Finnish.
Drat... I knew I should have looked that up first, does that mean I lose nerd points?
This is perfect for the thought I had:
Eye tracking. Presumably he can still move his eyes and look around, and there's already an IR camera tracking light mounted on his glasses. Convert that into an eye-tracking camera, connect it to this software.. Revolutionize!
Actually, this software looks like it'd be pretty good for cell phone input as well. Maybe it couldn't beat real typing, but it might help fix spelling errors.
Is he still able to breathe by himself? If so, could he use timed breathing as a method of data-entry?
I'd say you lose nerd points not just for not bothering to look it up, but for failing to recognise that the "English" term you mention is, essentially, Latin, and therefore very likely to occur in languages related to Latin.
Getting slightly more on-topic, I've found that being multi-lingual means you end up thinking about things in the language you normally use to communicate about them in. So, for example, I end up thinking about university administration in Finnish, the upcoming presidential election in Swedish and computer science in English. In part, this is simply to avoid making the effort to translate (for example, the admin staff at our university is predominantly Finnish-speaking), but also because some of the terminology may be unfamiliar in some languages (the more esoteric a subject is, the more likely it is that everything I read about it is in English) or simply not standardised.
and still not giving up? in my church the main would definitely be a saint
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)