Lines of enquiry

• kateshrewsday

So my new Android phone can be found, it seems, simply if I enquire after its whereabouts at the top of my voice.

The new skill, of speaking when being shouted to, comes courtesy of a small program imaginatively named ‘Where’s My Droid’.

The idea is that you holler a key word at the top of your voice. Obediently, ideally, the little guy starts singing and vibrating for all its plucky battery is worth.

Somewhere between the program and the sundry bundle of sensors in the hardware, there is a detector dedicated to the very words I specify.

Sentimentally, I specified its name. R2. But bellowing that got no joy; so I spelled it out phonetically: Artoo.

I bawled. Nothing.

So I keyed in the generic words for the programme: ‘Where’s My Droid’. Perhaps the little chap would recognise them.

Rien. This exercise was beginning to feel distinctly one-sided.

My simple, high-decibel enquiries, it seems, are falling on deaf sensors. My droid’s detection skills are not yet finely enough honed. Back to the drawing board for us all.

Perhaps my enquiries are just too mundane. When machines listen, they can be listening for things on a far grander scale; as a young worker at Bell Telephone Laboratories found out, entirely by chance.

Karl Jansky’s father was a university lecturer, but Karl preferred the cut and thrust of working life. The prestigious research and development organisation founded by telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell offered him a job the year after he collected his physics degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The year was 1928.

The company asked Jansky to investigate a line of enquiry. It seemed the company were having problems with sending voices over very long distances. There was a static crackle no-one could identify, a rogue white noise creating havoc.

So Jansky set to work. He built a huge rotating antenna: folks called it ‘Jansky’s Merry-Go-Round’.

He pointed it out into the atmosphere, and he used an automated pen-and-paper system to record the frequencies it detected.

Now here’s the thing. Jansky could identify three kinds of static. One was caused by nearby thunderstorms. One, by storms further away.

And the third was an unidentifiable signal which was showing up on the recording; a signal which peaked about once every 24 hours.

Something out there was trying to tell him something.

He thought it was the sun: but after a few months of measurements, the peak moved slowly away from the position of the star at the centre of our universe.

As he continued to analyse the peak, it appeared to happen at intervals of 23 hours and 56 minutes.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Astronomers’ time is used to view stars in the night sky. It’s based on the earth’s rotation relative to the cosmos.  A sidereal day is – wait for it – 23 hours 56 minutes.

So the static must be coming from something which was following the same path, at the same pace, as the stars.

These interstellar detectives closed in on their suspect. Jansky put together all his strands of evidence and concluded that the wrecker of the long-distance telephone call was, in fact, the Milky Way.

Case solved. It was a seismic discovery in the field of astronomy.

At which Bell Labs re-assigned Jansky to another project. Another day, another dollar: Jansky never worked in the field of astronomy again.

These detectives: they have to earn their crust. Other astronomers went on to develop detectors which could find radio waves from a bewildering array of astronomical sources. Pulsars, Quasars and radio galaxies: they have all been apprehended courtesy of that first mystery, solved by a telephone man.

That need to make ends meet: it radiates from the books of another, entirely different form of detective: that of the solver of crime.

As numerous as the stars, these crime fighters: they solve their mysteries against so many backdrops, from a quiet village to Victorian London, from a mediaeval monastery to the forensic science lab.

But my favourite detective hails from the windy city: Chicago, Illinois.

Raymond Chandler led an erratic life, worthy of his own pulp fiction novel. But his creation, Philip Marlowe, is simply one of the greatest detective figures of all time.

Marlowe is a Good Guy. Flawed, given: but with a solid moral compass. Chandler writes with a wry grounded humour, a knack of long winding sentences which constantly surprise, and end with a laugh-out-loud wisecrack.

Like this, from the Big Sleep:

“The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.

“The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.”

It comes down to this: the art of detection comes not by shouting to get what you want, as I have been with my little droid, but by piecing, Jansky-like, the story together with all the self-effacing native intelligence and wit of my hero, Philip Marlowe.

Maybe I’ll go back to the droid and try a little light interrogation in a Chicago drawl.

29 thoughts on “Lines of enquiry”

  1. A good read. My phone asked me if I wanted the voice recognition in French or English… I’ve tried both and I obviously don’t have the right accent in either. I find myself phoning the butcher when I asked for my boyfriend. Sigh. Good luck with the re-training programme.

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  2. I take pictures of my food, Our Alice already thinks I am mad. What if I started shouting names at my phone, the poor woman would call a witchdoctor … never mind fiddling with knots!

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  3. Thank goodness my phone doesn’t want me to talk TO it. It’s enough of a pain as it is.

    I love good detective work in a book, not shooting etc, but the intricacies *spelling* of solving the case.

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  4. Retrieving your phone reminds me of the “clapper Christmas” where my aunt shouting at my cousin kept turning the lights on and off! I can just imagine screaming, into one’s purse, “Droid” or “Artoo” are you in there?

    Philip Marlowe is the classic detective, isn’t he, but G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown and good ol’ Sherlock Holmes also have guessing.

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    1. LOL screaming into one’s purse; one’s relatives would soon start to ask questions, Penny 😀 I, too , love Father Brown and Holmes; but Marlowe’s dishevelled charm still wins the day for me…

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  6. No static here, Kate! A crystal clear transmission from first to last. I hope that you and R2 are communicating as clearly B4 long.

    Loved the tie in to BTL ~ my dad worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories from college to retirement.
    His most notorious work ~ Telestar.
    We spent an entire summer in Maine (battling bats) so that he could be “go for launch.”

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  7. You’re a pretty good detective yourself, Kate – the amazing tidbits of information you unearth on a regular basis. No doubt you’ll figure out sooner rather than later just what makes that Droid tick (or at least, jump to attention). Incidentally, my mother (who’s legally blind) uses a voice-activated system to place phone calls but it’s sufficiently inaccurate for her to have to ask, when someone picks up the phone on the other end, who(m) she called…

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  8. Don’t know what to say about your phone (I’m tech stupified), but Raymond Chandler is divine!

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  9. Would love to hear that Chi-town drawl, Kate! I keep on stumbling upon Chicago’s name today, perhaps it is time to pony up cash for a visit this Fall. Hope you and R2 become thick as thieves very soon~

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    1. I’m a closet VI Warschauski fan, Angela, but I ran out of words before I got to her. One day I will get to Chicago and ride the L…hope you get there-and be sure to write about it if you do 😀

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  10. I wonder how Jansky celebrated his mind-blowing discovery…

    Do you ever watch live BBC programs with captions on? After your experience with your Droid, it will give you a whole new respect for live voice captioners! (of course, every now and then it goes horribley wrong – “there will be mugginess” coming out as “there will be my p?n?s” – not a good look on the BBC)

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    1. Oh,BB,you have discovered a secret vice of mine…I discovered that I could maintain a telephone conversation whilst keeping track with events on the screen via subtitles. They are one of the tiny whacky joys that makes my world go round…

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  11. Voice recognition has me in stitches, since Cyclo put a voice activated thingy in his car to activate his phone. He has to enunciate and shout repeatedly. Often without success 🙂

    On the other end I have been tempted to try to train some sort of voice activated thingy for the computer so I can write’ without typing. Have you tried that?

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      1. I’m told it’s worth paying for the better ones that you can easily ‘train’….

  12. Kate ~ I didn’t realize your eyes were still on the blink. If you want some ideas on voice recognition software, Paula has been “training” Sonya for some time now.

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