Serendipity
While I was fruitlessly searching for the Erla walking detector patent, running through the patent sitemap as usual, I ran across this odd little gadget. The patent sitemap includes a random assortment of patents that Google's OCR system couldn't read properly. Malfunctioning AI is always fun to read, and the list sometimes yields a bit of serendipity.

This patent is listed as a Calctjlatob. It was invented in 1925 by Carl Art of Spokane, presumably working with his brother Prior Art, the most prolific inventor in the world.



It seems to be a wheel chart or customized slide rule, formed up as a deck of cards. The front card has the title 'Tell your own fortune!'

You'd slide the cursor on the front card to your current age, then fan out the deck to see the chart of monthly savings needed to reach a desired goal at retirement. A nice connection to the thoughts about luck and savings in previous item.

The chart assumed 4% interest on savings, verifying other observations that 4% was the standard for many decades.

The idea is still around; this ad for Ally Bank has a similar flavor and leads to a JS-based Calctjlatob for the same purpose.



But the goal is vastly harder to reach now that interest is permanently extinct.

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Tech sidenote: Google seems to have different levels of OCR for its different departments. The OCR in the Books section manages to read all languages, and all sorts of obscure typefaces scanned from every possible angle. The Patents system fails far more often, even with patents that are cleanly scanned and easily readable by the eye. Some of these errors are almost universal and systematic. The two errors in Calctjlatob, tj for u and b for r, are extremely common. A smart AI system should be able to spot these statistically and create a rule: If result doesn't fit a word in dictionary, try these two substitutions.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 8:10 AM