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Old November 15th, 2007, 06:11 AM posted to rec.travel.australia+nz
kangaroo16
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Posts: 222
Default An American's Impressions

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:01:20 +0800, "gerrit"
wrote in
:


"kangaroo16" wrote in message
.. .

10,000 or 100,000 words later, they might grasp the
essentials. :-)





In your case I would suspect much closer to 100,000 if not more. :-)

Gerrit


Well, mate, I've spent most of my life in Oz, have accumulated a
lot of new experiences, seen a lot of new things, done a lot of
things, given them a fair bit of thought, and so on.

It would be interesting to know how many words I could speak in
an hour of conversation, actually. There might be a market for a
compact electronic device that would actually count them, just to
satisfy my curiosity. I suppose I could ask my wife how many
words she has heard from me since we married a few decades ago.

If she told be about a googolplex, I wouldn't know for sure if
she was exaggerating or not, though! :-) It would be nice to
have an actual count, or even a rough approximation.

A nice addition might be if it sounded a beep every 500 words or
so, but the constant beeping might become an annoyance.:-)

My typing speed is around 50 WPM, and I can probably do 2 or 3
times better than that with speech.

Hmm, wonder how good the current models of speech to text
converters are these days? Perhaps should get one to speed up my
Usenet posts a bit?

I will admit that I am seldom at a loss for words. Took a public
speaking class once at uni. Class members would have to reach
into a box filled with an assortment of random small items, pick
one out at random and talk about it for five minutes or so. It
was great fun, actually.

Think what I could have accomplished had I been born with a
photographic memory...:-)

For people who were having sleep problems, I could give a long
boring lectures and have some of the audience asleep in minutes
:-)

Or I could turn my hand to writing pulp western or romance
novels. Even at the old rate of a couple of cents a word, could
bring in a nice income.

I see from this weeks "Time" magazine, Nov.19, that a section
dealing with new products, mostly technical. One is:


[to quote Time]
An ATM for Books

The "Expresso Book Machine"--meaning "fast" not coffee--can churn
out a 300 page paperback on demand, complete with color cover, in
just 3 min. The $50,000 machine could transform libraries into
minibook stores, making hard-to-find titles as accessible as
cappuccinos. At $3 a book they might be cheaper too.
Available Now
www.ondemandbooks.com

Oh well, enough for the moment, have been off doing some actual
housework.

Cheers,
Kangaroo16

[Who happily hops from one subject to another, even within
individual posts...]