Why not just give treecats keyboards?

To the question 'Why not just give treecats keyboards?'

A bit more thought needs to be applied to this idea. What you are suggesting is that a bunch of adolescent teens (treecats) with a mischievous sense of humor be given access to keyboards The keyboards would not just be connected to a translation program but also to the internet. All you need is one 'gifted' treecat to figure out the joy's of hacking and all of them will.

On the plus side you would then have a weapon that could bring any worlds computer net to it's knees in very short order.

Yow wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:A tree cat glove could translate sign into spoken or written text. Could be made very small very comfortable for haptic translations. Can be worn as a stand alone product or built into a skinsuit. Simple really. We can almost do this right now. It could be translated into whatever language you want. The deaf blind and mute talking to each other.

I liked this train of thought...
and one of the "modern" developments for sign language.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/col ... lator.aspx

Remember my post in the Cupid thread?

roseandheather wrote:
cthia wrote:

Almost forgot.
Is Dr. Aref married? I'd like to pair her up with someone, to keep her even more visible in the storyline.

I'm thinking Herlander. In tandem with Dr. Aref, he might even be able to develop some sort of artificial speech system governed by movements of the appropriate limbs.

That way, treecats would be able to communicate with the population as a whole.


Go sit in the corner and think about what you've done.

I do not need another ball in the air when I'm juggling 'shipping permutations of at least a dozen characters! And you are not helping!

*jabs finger in direction of corner*

Cthia wrote:
Oh alright, I'll go sit in the corner to think...again.

...thinking...

..thinking..

thinking...

Well, I've thought about it, and I still think its a good idea.

Remember Amy, the gorilla in Congo?
Amy communicated via sign language, sending electrical impulses to an artificial inteligence engine which translated the impulses to artificially generated words.

'Amy...Amy...me Amy...love...me...you.'

MaxxQ wrote:

Why not just give treecats keyboards?

Might we see a treecat Rick Wakeman or Vangelis?

Edit: Ooooo! With four "hands" capable of playing...!!

I love the spirit of the idea!

However I'm not sure treecats have the same taste and appreciation of music that humans do. Does anyone recall any examples in text of treecats enjoying or creating music?

BobfromSydney wrote:However I'm not sure treecats have the same taste and appreciation of music that humans do. Does anyone recall any examples in text of treecats enjoying or creating music?

Didn't Nimitz express an opinion about Honor's engineer's preference for Grayson Classical music?

ETA:

Ashes of Victory
Chapter Forty Three
wrote:" . . . spacers love smokey old bar rooms and clear crystal vacuum . . ."

"Sorry, Stinker," she told Nimitz under her breath, "but I did tell him he could program the entertainment banks." The 'cat gave her a pained look, and she grinned. "All right. All right! I'll talk to him about it, promise!"

Nimitz sniffed and groomed his whiskers at her, and she chuckled, then turned back to her controls.

Weird Harold wrote:

BobfromSydney wrote:However I'm not sure treecats have the same taste and appreciation of music that humans do. Does anyone recall any examples in text of treecats enjoying or creating music?

Didn't Nimitz express an opinion about Honor's engineer's preference for Grayson Classical music?

ETA:

Ashes of Victory
Chapter Forty Three
wrote:" . . . spacers love smokey old bar rooms and clear crystal vacuum . . ."

"Sorry, Stinker," she told Nimitz under her breath, "but I did tell him he could program the entertainment banks." The 'cat gave her a pained look, and she grinned. "All right. All right! I'll talk to him about it, promise!"

Nimitz sniffed and groomed his whiskers at her, and she chuckled, then turned back to her controls.

Exactly. And since Grayson's "classical music" is based on country & western, I agree with Nimitz. Frankly, that could have been one thing I would have been happy with Grayson forgetting about.

What happens when you play a c&w album backwards?

Your dog comes back to life, your wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend comes back, you get sober, your truck starts running again...

We have a bracelet and rings now in RL that can translate sign language and convert spoken speech into text for a deaf person to read.

http://www.ecouterre.com/sign-language- ... -language/

It's a plot device. Not a very well thought out plot device, but that's how it works sometimes.

Me snorts derisively. Same reason I don't try to type on a Japanese keyboard, let alone a Chinese one. The language is too difficult to type quickly.

Think of it this way. Treecats think in something more akin to visual space, not word space. They've figured out that the mind-blind humans use symbols and stuff, but why bother when you can go mind to mind at full speed and image density.

Eventually them poor cats have to communicate the slow way with a really tiny vocabulary with those poor mind blind humans. Now then, plot wise.... we hands the treecat a keyboard.

Nasty nano-programmed assassin comes online to do evil thing. do you want your treecat a) trying to figure out how to say "that little size female person over there at 75 degrees, not the one at 45 degrees with the gold patchc on her left bum pocket is arming a bomb because the evil overlords got to her" in sign, trying to type it on a keyboard in that amounts to a foreign language, or, would you rather the 'cat take immediate action?

Treecats are smart, social, protective hunters, not geeks.

Ah keyboarding besides the fact treecats think differently IE. not in words, remember a few things about the keyboard:

1) Designed for eight fingered two thumbed human hands not the six fingered two thumbed treecat hands.

2) Designed for a larger human hand even though treecat fingers are long and slim their hands are much smaller than a human's hand.

3) The QWERTY type arrangement was designed to prevent fast typists fro jamming early manual typewriters.

As also noted the sign language understood by a few special people communication is one of RFC's plot devices. Having any one able to communicate with the cats by a simple camera and program combination would lower the mystique of the special people A simple translator device fitted on a collar is well within the technology, see Mange's translation collar drawing below. The technology almost exists now. Also programs turning speech into type are in existence RFC uses it to write the books since his hand was injured. Thus why use a keyboard to input words. The programs can also read to you so in a since the cts using these programs can read n write

@ Tim Even better with four digit hands the treecats would logically use base four or eight similar to our digital friends that use base two, thus they should make superior hakers

Tim wrote:To the question 'Why not just give treecats keyboards?'

A bit more thought needs to be applied to this idea. What you are suggesting is that a bunch of adolescent teens (treecats) with a mischievous sense of humor be given access to keyboards The keyboards would not just be connected to a translation program but also to the internet. All you need is one 'gifted' treecat to figure out the joy's of hacking and all of them will.

On the plus side you would then have a weapon that could bring any worlds computer net to it's knees in very short order.

Poker

I thought that mange just signed to his partner who did the typing.


[quote="John Prigent"]I thought Mange already had a keyboard.
Cheers
John