The Good-Bad-O-Meter

[dmaze]

How come nobody has invented a Good-Bad-O-Meter? It has a trivial UI -- it's a small box, with a needle on the front, and you point it at something and the needle swings towards "good" or "bad". Q, for example, might give one to James Bond, "point this at the girl and only seduce her if it points to 'good'". My particular application is for horticulture; I want something that can tell me if something is a weed or not.

There's some complication, of course, in that things aren't necessarily totally evil (Darth Vader), and some things are neither good nor bad (the Dread Gazebo, Ash from Army of Darkness). But these are just engineering problems.

Comments

[crs.livejournal.com]

"point this at the girl and only seduce her if it points to 'good'" ... but then the seduction won't work!

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

I will be happy to function as a partial weed-meter.

[nonnihil.livejournal.com]

You would need to Harness the power of the internet for arbitrary moral judgement.

[desireearmfeldt]

"A weed is a plant that's not wanted--I want all my plants." :)

Seriously, you don't need a good/bad meter, you need a plant-identifier, because what you want is to keep all the plants that meet some criteria of desirability, and get rid of the ones that meet some criteria of undesirability.

(e.g. for me, I keep things that flower and uproot things with deep roots that will undermine my house. Now, your sole criterion might be "things I planted" versus "things I didn't plant." :) )

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

I have this handy weed-recognition tip. When planting a new thing from seed, only plant it in one area. Then, when faced with a puzzling sprout in that area, you need only check whether the same type of sprout exists in other places in your yard. If so, it's a weed. A variation on this is to plant things in lines or other geometric shapes, but that looks kind of dumb for flowers, so I don't do it much. After the first year, you'll probably recognize most of the plants.