[ExI] hey dr, bugger

[Dave Sill]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 10:41 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> For instance, yesterday I was out hiking with the cub scouts.  We saw a
> bug that I had never seen before.  As I was fumbling for my phone to take a
> picture, it flew off.  I still don’t know what it was.  If I saw that
> species once in all my tragically many years, good chance I will never see
> it again, but I still want to know stuff about that bug.
>

Seems like that's a bigger problem than identifying the species from a
photo, but that could easily be solved by something like Google Glass that
constantly records everything you see.

Wouldn’t it be cool if I could pull out my phone and Hey Dr. Bugger, have
> it come up with some kind of program that already knows I am looking for
> something about insects, or I am about to give it an image-recognition task
> involving insects.  It would already know my location and the time of year,
> so it would know what species are likely to be in the adult phase then and
> there.  It would log that observation, time, place, image.  We could work
> together, those of us who are into this kind of thing, create a
> public-access database.
>

That would be cool, but I suspect Google Search will be usable for that
before a grassroots effort could create something usable. I've already used
Google image searches to identify plants, animals, and flowers, and that's
without any high-level interpretation or geolocation involved.


> The question is not about entomology but rather commercial computing
> products, for I can think of a hundred uses before breakfast.  We could
> make something like this for sports cars or business locations or birds or
> hell anything that catches one’s fancy, no reason to explain why it does (I
> can’t really explain why bugs interest me.)
>

Absolutely, there are tons of applications.

Is there some kind of software which allows a user to create a database or
> collection of links, put it on our phones and have it searchable by voice
> command?
>
>
That's old-school thinking, Spike. It's gotta be cloud-based and
crowd-sourced.

-Dave
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