Atomictumor

Of late, our 4 year old, Pigpen (whom GAC is lobbying to rename “Mr. Masher”, which does have some merit), has been channeling another personality.

You see, he REALLY likes dinosaurs.

So much so, that it appears that he has channelled the spirit of Ping Ping, a T-Rex from (what we would guess to be) the late Cretaceous Era, who enjoys talking in a dinosaur voice, stomping, and occasionally roaring. Theres also the subtle dinosaur whisper, but we’re not sure exactly what kind of communication it is. We assume that it was an evolutionary sidetrack.

Interestingly enough, when the person unfamilar with Ping Ping enquires as to why the lad is going around with two fingers poking out of his fist, he replies (in dino voice, naturally):

“These are my little arms.
I have a tail growing out of my butt.
My eyes are glinting.
My teeth are sharp.
I have horns here and here. (points to the horns that T-Rexs have on their legs, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that 100 years of archeology and dinosaur study are totally clueless as to the true skeleton structure of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex)
My name is Ping Ping the T-Rex.
I am a woman T-Rex.
Rarrrrrrr.”

Yeah, I’m not sure where it comes from either.

In news sure to make Bos grab his tinfoil, the Register reports that Google might be working on technology that’ll listen to the ambient noise coming in from a PC’s microphone and serve up ads based on the context of what their software picked up.

The Google program converts sound into graphs, weeds out background noise, and reduces the graphs to key features that can then be translated into just four bytes of information, so that the fingerprints for an entire year of television programming would add up to no more than a few gigabytes, the company said.

Ideally, they’ll be using this mighty software for sending you ads based on what you’re watching on TV, etc, but wow, boy howdy, lets hear it for mysterious eavesdropping through open lines that you probably never realized were open.

Course, (and this is all just AT speculatin, now), they’d have to have client software installed on the desktop (probably something called Google Desktop, which is now a required download with Google Earth or Picasa) in order to record and parse the information coming through the microphone.  You’d also, of course, have to have the thing in the fully on position.

I’m sure this’ll come through MSM before too long, and they’ll be all like “OMG, teh Google is hax0rd j00!”, but I’d have a hard time thinking that any reputable company would drop software on your computer designed to essentially bug you aurally without letting you know.  That’d be the domain of the shady spyware companies who may or may not have the money invested to write the software, and certainly not to store all of the data.

Oh, and the .gov.  They’d probably do it too.