Eccentric Flower:199809/patterns and climaxes

eleven september ninety eight noon

Patterns and Climaxes

Well, it was cold enough to keep the windows closed last night, so for the first time in several nights - like, for the last three weeks - I wasn't treated to the sound of my neighbors climaxing, sometime around midnight.

It was really very interesting in a perverse kind of way - I guess no two people sound exactly alike when they're having an orgasm; not quite as individual as fingerprints but close.

Fingerprints (and, yes, I guess orgasms) are the kind of pattern-recognition problems that give computers fidgets. If no two fingerprints look alike, a computer would say, then how do we know they're fingerprints? Where's the common point of reference that will enable me to put these items in the same category together?

We all know what an orgasm sounds like (well, in a female we do; we'll come back to that). If we didn't know what an orgasm sounded like, the sequence in When Harry Met Sally wouldn't be funny - to name one example.

But since no two people sound exactly the same way, what is it that makes an orgasm recognizable to the ear?

This is frivolity, but it relates to serious stuff. Almost every day I end up writing a program or portion of one where I have to tell a computer "find all the strings of text that look sorta like this." Pattern matching is the single most sophisticated part of the language Perl, for example, and the tools 'awk' and 'sed' which it stole from. These are designed to help computers do things like find all words in a text starting with the letter 'a'.

That's more complicated than you think, because first you have to teach the computer some basics we take for granted - i.e. What's a "word"? Which of these characters are "letters"? Do I assume that an 'A' is the same as an 'a', or does it make a difference? And you have to tell it this every time - each time the program runs, you must build the rules from the ground up.

I can teach the program what a "sentence" is (a string of whitespace-separated characters, possibly including line breaks, ending with the character '.') and what a paragraph is, but some tasks are fiendishly complex, like teaching a computer parts of speech. You may not have remembered much of your grammar class, but presumably you can find the nouns in a sentence. A computer can't, not without hard work, a little juryrigging, and a lot of overhead.

Pattern recognition is something you will hear more and more about, as computers increasingly replace human labor for rote-level tasks - not because of an expensive labor market, but because companies simply can't afford to do it at human speed (slow). The Post Office has some of the best pattern-matching software around right now - they use it to read your handwriting on the front of the envelopes.

Think about that one for a while. How many ways are there to make an 'A'? How do you teach the computer the underlying core of "a-ness" - the idea of "two slanty lines meeting at a point, with a horizontal crossbar somewhere along the way"? (The way I make capital A's, they look more like triangles - crossbar way low.)

But back to orgasms.

One of the surprises of the noises floating in my window was that the man was making just as much noise as the woman was. I realized that although I had a mental picture - a pattern, if you will - for "female climax noise" in my head, I didn't have an equivalent male one. There was no there there. And, upon glancing around the media, I realized this wasn't just me. Everyone has a fairly good idea of what a female orgasm sounds like, but not a male one. Are men expected to not make any noise in bed? Is it considered unmasculine somehow? Last porn film I saw, I seem to recall that the guy didn't make any noise at all, not even a grunt. The woman, meanwhile, was somewhere in the unsafe decibels.

Perhaps there's an inequity here we need to work on correcting. More noise from the men! Whoop it up in there! Unleash your inner vocalist!

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