The perils of automatic content
I was procrastinating from work again, reading about the “Top 50 innovations” of plastics technology in the past 50 years (when I was supposed to be reading about displacement of primary production with recycled materials, but as it turns out there’s not much to read about that, which is why we will propose to the NSF that it be studied (by us).
But anyway, there I was, reading about number 22, “Takeout Robots” on the free library, which provides links to lookup the meanings of important terms embedded in the text. One such term is “takeout” which maybe if you’re a plastics manufacturing professional you know what it means, but I don’t. So I hovered over “takeout” hoping for a definition.
Instead I get: “takeout: a financing to refinance or takeout another loan.” Hm, that’s not too helpful. Maybe it’s a fluke. After all, it does give a proper definition for “injection molding.”
Also “originate in.” Funny choice to hyperlink “originate in” but not “Japan”, which is where takeout robots ostensibly originated [in].
But if we press on, we find that this pneumatic swing-type model of takeout robot is similar to a sprue picker, where sprue is “a chronic disorder of the small intestine.” Moreover, takeout robots attracted attention at NPE 1973, where NPE could mean any one of “NullPointerException (java)”, “Natural Penis Enlargement”, or “Nutrition Program for the Elderly.”
But I distort. National Plastics Exposition (presumably the correct choice) is also listed as one possible meaning of NPE (buried as the fourth choice of 6…), but still- maybe the Free Dictionary folks haven’t realized that context plays a part in semantics. On the linked page, there are ten automatically-generated links, of which four are flat out wrong (takeout, sprue, molder, and AEC); three appear correct (though they’re all specialized terms: injection molding, servo drive, programmable logic controller); one is ambiguous (NPE); one (North America) is a gimmee; and the last (originate in) is just bizarre, serving only to draw attention to the fact that this automatic link-generating machine doesn’t know what it’s doing.
“but Brandon, don’t you ever do anything but complain?”
at times, it seems, no.