The Art and Science of Everything

John Mark was telling me about a Eudora plug in that places a waiting period on your emails so you can have a cooling off period during which you can take back some terrible mail retort you’ve composed. We talked about how it would be cool if it could actually detect when I’m angry, perhaps eavesdropping and using some voice processing. This is a very Lilly-centric solution since I curse my computer when I’m frustrated (well, mostly I get frustrated at my computer, not humans).

That spurred another idea. What about a computer program that eavesdrops on me and when I seem to cursing (or acting otherwise, detectably angry), flashes a picture from cuteoverload.com? I’m sure something so simple will have lots of rough edges and annoying interludes, but it would be an interesting probe into the sort of subtleties of attention and overture that Wendy Ju talks about in her paper on implicit interactions.