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“This is very weird,” Josh said.

“Weirder than a six inch tall cigar smoking demon from Brooklyn?” Jenny asked.

Josh considered this. “Yes, I see your point. But still, what on earth do we do now?”

“No,” Mr. Symarian corrected him. “Not on Earth, I’m afraid. I don’t believe we are meant to return to Earth — or what you would call Earth — until we have completed our mission.”

“Well that’s just great. Anybody know how we’re supposed to do that?” Josh looked around at his three companions, but nobody said a word.

Finally Jenny said, “Anything is better than standing here. Let’s go.” And with that she started off into the woods. She didn’t get very far. “Oh my gosh,” she said, “This is the thickest forest I’ve ever seen. I can’t get more than a few feet into it.”

“Let me try,” Josh said, and he started off in a different direction. Jenny watched in astonishment as he walked right into the woods, as though taking a stroll in the park. “Hey, this isn’t so hard,” he said.

“Sid looked at Mr. Symarian. “Kid’s a pathfinder.”

“A what-finder?” Josh looked confused.

“Our little friend is trying to say,” their teacher explained, “that you always go in the right direction.’

“Wait a second,” Josh looked suspicious. “What happens if I go in a different direction?”

“Look kid, listen to your teacher,” Sid said. “Doesn’t matter which way you go. It’s always the way the path goes. Yeah sure, you can try to change it up, but that’s where the path’ll be. Like I said, you’re a pathfinder. Do I gotta spell it out for you? You — find — paths.”

“Josh,” Jenny said, “Don’t argue with them. Just walk.”

Shrugging his shoulders Josh plunged once more into the brush. Jenny followed, and Mr. Symarian followed her. “Hey!” Sid shouted. “What about yours truly here? What am I, chopped liver?”

“Um,” Jenny said, “Can’t you just fly?”

Sid fanned one of his wings, eyeing it critically. “Nothin’ doing. The wings’re strictly vestigial. They make me look pretty though, don’t they?”

Before they could say anything in reply, Mr. Symarian had scooped the little demon up and deposited him on one shoulder. “I suggest we refrain from dawdling,” he said. “These spells usually contain an element of time. If we do not move with alacrity, I’m afraid we could become permanently mired in this dimension. And then things might become most unpleasant.”

And with that, they plunged onward.

Today I saw a very cool talk by researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft, about an armband that senses vibrations caused by touch. If you wear the armband on your left arm, and then use a finger of your right hand to touch various places on your left arm (or hand or fingers), a computer can analyze vibrations in the armband to figure exactly where you touched.

This means that you can turn your own body into a user interface. For example, you can dial a phone number just by tapping various places on your palm — as though your hand were a numeric keypad. Things get really interesting if you project images onto your arm and hand (eg: through one of those tiny pico-projectors). Then your body effectively becomes a complete computer interface.

The authors gave all kinds of amazing demos, and the audience was impressed by the sheer novelty of it. But things got even more interesting during the question and answer session after the talk. People were clearly engaged by the philosophical implications of turning our own bodies into computer interfaces.

One guy got up to the microphone and asked “How does it feel to be a button?” The speakers didn’t really have an answer to that. I suppose by the time technology has truly turned you into a button, you won’t really notice you’re a button.

In the break afterward, I was chatting with some friends who had also seen the talk. We started musing about how such technologies might change interpersonal relations. For example, body-touch technologies might change the taboos around how and when it is appropriate for one person to touch another.

Imagine if I could use your body as a computer interface, or vice versa. Not only could this be considered an intimate act, but such actions could very well have real consequences. If I let you touch me, and you end up deleting my files, that could be considered a violation of trust.

We may very well be entering a world in which “pushing someone’s buttons” is more than a euphemism.

Sid was pacing back and forth on the desk. “I’m guessing your grandma fell in with a bad crowd, and now some shady operators are using the old gal for their own nefarious purposes.”

“I’m afraid he’s right,” Mr. Symarian said, looking at Jenny sympathetically. “Your grandmother had the power, much as you yourself have. There are forces in other dimensions who will stop at nothing to capture the unwary possessor of such power, and turn its potential toward their own ends. I’m afraid some unscrupulous demons are using your grandmother as an Astral Lens.”

“Did you just say `Astral Lens’,” Josh said. “What is this, a physics class? Are you saying somebody is using Jenny’s grandmother for some kind of demon optics experiment?”

“I only wish it were that benign,” their teacher said. “The power itself is neither good nor evil — it can be turned to any direction. And in the case of your poor grandmother, I am afraid…”

“I won’t let them get away with this,” Jenny interrupted, stamping her foot in anger. “I’m through with being nice. I think maybe it’s time we faced our demons.”

Strangely, in the place where her foot came down, instead of the expected hard wooden floor she felt something soft. Looking down in surprise, Jenny was amazed to see grass beginning to grow around her foot. The grass quickly spread, until it had grown beyond the walls, which had now been replaced by a thick canopy of trees.

They found themselves standing in a small copse in a densely overgrown wood. All except Sid, who was standing on a large rock at about table height. For a long moment the four of them all just looked at each other, too stunned to say anything.

Josh was the first to break the silence. “Toto,” he said, “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Sid gave Josh a puzzled look. “Ok, I can deal with the whole being transported to another world thing, seeing as the little gal said she wanted to face those demons. But who the hell is this Toto guy? Him I never heard of.”

The other day I mentioned the wonderfully twisted little sentence in the title of this post, courtesy of Gary Marcus. Although arguably grammatical, the sentence does not correspond to the way human brains actually think.

Its meaning, said in a more human-friendly way, is (more or less): “Some people, who were left by some other people, left.” English grammar. with its enormous flexibility, allows us to phrase this more tersely as “People people left left”, but that doesn’t mean anybody actually either talks or listens that way. In other words, if you try to write down formal rules for generating natural language, you will end up generating some sentences that are not really natural speech — in the sense that nobody would ever say them, and nobody would understand them.

Conversely, there are English sentences one might think should be convoluted and hard to understand, but that nobody has any trouble with. In his book The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker quotes a great old example:

Daddy trudges upstairs to Junior’s bedroom to read his son a bedtime story. Junior spots the book, scowls, and asks, “Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?”

As a grammatical structure, the kid’s sentence is nested four levels deep, and yet English speakers — including children — generally have no problem understanding it. As Pinker points out, this is because the four nested levels of the boy’s sentence are all different.

In computer science terms, and putting the two examples together, people have no trouble with sentences structured like this: “( [ { < > } ] )” — as in Pinker’s example — but we get stuck on seemingly simpler sentences structured like this: “( ( ) )” — as in the example from Gary Marcus.

In other words, human brains don’t really work as stack machines when creating and understanding sentences. Our brains operate by matching tokens — and those tokens need to all be distinct.

Circling back around to my previous post about Getting to know your robot, I’ve been playing around with software that works with what we know about natural language, as a way to — potentially — bridge the enormous gulf between the way people naturally think and the way computers need to be told how to follow instructions.

It was dark. And cold. There were scrabbling noises somewhere off in the distance, and a slow miasma that was not as much sensed as felt. A deep pulsing emanated from the pit beneath, and clawing figures scrambled for purchase on unseen slime covered rock.

Amelia no longer had use for thoughts of time. A moment stretched to eternity, and eternity promised naught but an unbroken landscape of inescapable despair. It had not always been thus. There had been sunlight once, laughter and kindness and the voices of other souls. She bristled at the memory, for that world was a dream, and nothing left but bitter ash.

But a voice was calling now, as if from a great distance. Amelia recoiled back in upon herself. This was new, and newness meant fear. She still felt the bitter sting of betrayal, deep and abiding, and in the darkness of her soul she knew one thing, and one thing alone. There could be no truth, no salvation, no purchase on the slime covered rock.

I saw a delightful talk this week by Gary Marcus, giving examples from his book Kluge, the haphazard construction of the human mind. In this particular talk he highlighted various quirks and ambiguities in natural language.

For example, he pointed out that even seemingly simple sentences can be difficult for people to parse, if those sentences don’t conform to the way people think. My favorite of his examples along these lines was: “People people left left.”

That wonderful sentence is only four words long (sentences don’t get much shorter than that), and follows the standard rules of grammar, yet seems incomprehensible to many quite intelligent people. Although it’s grammatically correct, it doesn’t correspond to the way people think. In case you’re having trouble understanding what the sentence means, I’ll describe it more completely in a few days.

Some the many other fun examples he gave included inherently ambiguous sentences such as: “The spy shot the policeman with the revolver”, and “Put the cup on the towel on the table.” For each of these sentences there are two perfectly plausible yet entirely distinct meanings.

These ambiguous sentences got me thinking. Might it be possible to write an entire story — perhaps a novel — in which the meaning of every sentence was similarly ambiguous? I’m sure it would be very difficult (and maybe you’d have to be a little crazy to try). But such a novel would be a fascinating thing to read. One possible first sentence is the title of this post.

The next day — Jenny could not believe it was merely the next day — she found herself the focus of attention as the four of them sat around, taking stock of the previous day’s events. Well no, she corrected herself, only three of them were sitting around. Sid was actually standing on Mr Symarian’s desk, in his usual spot.

“Jenny, is there is something you are not telling us?” Mr. Symarian was asking.

“I’m sorry Mr. Symarian, I didn’t expect anything like this,” she said. “I’ve missed Grandma terribly since she’s been gone, and I thought this whole finding a key thing was a sign that I could reach out to her in some way. When Sid appeared, I thought it meant there was a real chance.”

“Except,” Josh said, “you were expecting somebody nice.”

Jenny nodded. “Exactly! Grandma was just about the kindest, sweetest person you could ever imagine. That’s why we all loved her so much. She didn’t have a mean bone in her body. But yesterday, when we conjured up that, that … thing … it felt all wrong. Like it wasn’t really Grandma at all. I mean it was her, but it wasn’t her. If you see what I mean.” Jenny looked around expectantly.

“Yeah kid, I get ya,” Sid nodded. “You’re close to Grandma, you got some kinda bond thing, like you’re connected. You figure that’s gonna continue, even after the old lady kicks it. I’d figure it the same way if I was in your shoes. Not that I would wear shoes.” he added hastily.

“But why does it matter,” Josh asked. “Your grandmother’s gone. Why would you care about a picture on a table?”

“Because it means she’s not gone,” Jenny said. “It’s not like she’s in heaven or whatever. Something’s happened to her — something bad. Sid, are there bad demons that could do something like this?”

Sid rubbed his wings together thoughtfully before replying. “I gotta level with you here. We ain’t all as good hearted as me. And we certainly ain’t all as good looking. Like the man once said, sometimes you gotta take the meat with the gravy.”

“Are you sure you got that last part right?” Josh asked.

“Quiet Josh!” Jenny said. “This is serious. I think we have to rescue Grandma.”

“Well,” said Mr Symarian. “That means we will need all the tools we can get to reach out to her and pull her from the Astral dimension. Let’s start with the basics. Jenny, what was your Grandmother’s first name?”

“Her name,” Jenny said, “was — is — Amelia.”

The first time I ever went to India — to attend a conference in Goa — the person who had invited us arranged for several of us foreign visitors to take a small tour of Mumbai the day before our respective flights back home. He arranged for a taxi driver to take our little crew — two Americans (including yours truly), a German grad student, and a professor from England, on a tour of the sights.

One thing that made the entire adventure slightly surreal was the fact that our taxi driver spoke nothing but Hindi, whereas none of us spoke any Hindi at all. So we ended up being driven around Mumbai — which means madly careening from one location to another at top speed, missing oncoming cars and random pedestrians by mere inches — until at various points the driver would suddenly stop, which would be our cue to get out and try to figure out where we were. Then, we’d pile in again and careen off to the next mysterious stop.

Sometimes we could figure it out from context. One stop was clearly a famous market of some sort — an opportunity to purchase gorgeous silk scarves and other raiments in astounding shades of turquoise and saffron, all at exhilaratingly low prices.

Another stop was a Hindu temple, no doubt one of great importance and significance — just not to us. In any case, it was exceedingly beautiful. Among other stops were a lovely park of some sort, a large government building, and a rather spectacular train station that clearly dated back to the days of Queen Victoria.

But one stop in particular had us stumped for a while. We were let off by our driver at what looked like an ordinary house. Nothing fancy, just a simple entry hall and some furnished rooms, all slightly musty and old fashioned.

I went with the German grad student, a very likable young man with whom I’d had some splendid conversations in the preceding days, to wander through the house, as we both valiantly tried to figure out where we were. Then we came upon some framed black and white pictures on the wall, and suddenly realized that we were standing in the house where Mahatma Gandhi used to live.

As we contemplated the photos of Gandhi shaking hands, greeting various world leaders, and generally setting the stage for his magnificent non-violent revolution, we were filled with a sense of quiet awe at the way this exceptional man had managed to accomplish so much.

I turned to my young German friend and — without really thinking about what I was saying — remarked “Wow, wouldn’t you say that Gandhi was one of the five most important people in the twentieth century?”

There was a long pause, and then the German grad student replied, rather sheepishly, “Yes, we also had one of those. But it didn’t turn out very well.”

Indeed.

The four of them peered down at the slowly swirling form upon the table top. At first it was indistinct, mere shadow and outline, but gradually an image began to take shape. Jenny realized that she was still chanting. She had long since put down the notebook; the strange words were now coming from her mouth of their own volition.

Suddenly the words stopped, and she found herself staring in silence. The image, fully formed now, was of a woman in profile. The woman was almost young, and it was clear that she had once been beautiful — that she might still be beautiful, but for the expression on her face. It was an expression of pure cold hate, and utter distain.

As she gradually came to understand what she was seeing, Jenny could feel the hairs begin to rise on the back of her neck. “No,” she said, in a small quiet voice, slowly shaking her head. “No, it’s not right.”

She looked up at Josh, and he looked back at her in confusion. “This is not right!” Jenny repeated, her voice rising. “Grandma was not like this, not at all. It’s all horribly wrong.”

Without saying a word Josh came around the table, passing Mr. Symarian and Sid without looking at either of them. He put his arms around her. Jenny seemed to go limp in his embrace, letting herself be held. She buried her face in his shoulder, and began to cry.

The moment you actually look at an iPad, you realize it isn’t a computer at all. It’s paper.

This is not a device to do your work on. You don’t use it to program, or to write your term paper. No, it’s certainly not a device for the technorati. Which is great news for the technorati (although they don’t yet know it). Because it means that “computers” have finally made the great leap to a true consumer item, and therefore the cultural reach of your computer program (if you understand the terrain) is about to vastly expand.

I’m not saying that we’ll all be using an iPad in the future. Google will soon be coming out with its higher-resolution Android based competitor, with a built-in camera. Then Apple will leapfrog over that. Meanwhile some other company, perhaps HP, will do something different, and the battle will be on.

But it won’t be a battle between competing computers. It will be a battle over something much more interesting.

In the early days of the automobile, you couldn’t drive unless you were also a mechanic. To start your car in the first decade of the previous century, you needed to turn a big crank. If you didn’t do it right, the crank would spin back hard and perhaps break your arm. The monstrosity that was an early car was marketed as a dream of universal personal transport, but those early versions were anything but. The dream was of fun, but the reality was work.

And I would argue that the presence of the keyboard, the very fact that a notebook computer is a clamshell that needs to be opened, is a signifier that it is not built for fun, but rather is primarily a work device — much closer sociologically to that big old computer that sits on your office desk. Microsoft’s valiant attempt nine years ago to come out with a tablet PC was doomed not through any individual failure of concept or execution, but because it was a computer. Whether or not it came with a keyboard, it was still fundamentally a machine for knowledge workers to get their work done.

But the iPad is the first of a series of devices that are precisely not about getting work done. It’s not the iPad itself that is exciting, it’s the bold statement by Mr. Jobs and company that is inviting us to play with and consume information — not as an adjunct to work, but as a fundamentally valid activity in its own right.

When I look at an iPad, I don’t see an iPad. I see a device that doesn’t exist yet, of which the iPad is merely a harbinger. I see really cheap flat tablet shaped displays strewn around the rooms of houses and workplaces. I don’t care which tablet is which, because they are all interchangeable. I don’t need to bother taking a tablet from one room to another, because my data is all in the Cloud anyway.

If I’m reading the day’s news, having a video chat with friends, or seeing a film, and I want to go to another room, or across town, I know there will be another tablet there. When I pick up this new tablet, its built-in camera will recognize my face, and I will be able to resume whatever activity I was engaged in before.

This is not a computer. This is paper, the way we’ve always dreamed it would one day be.