I had a tooth extracted today, and I’m not my most cheerful. My periodontist has been after me for over two years to have this one out. He said (over and over) that there’s a lot of bone loss and that keeping it was endangering the next tooth over, sort of a domino theory of tooth loss. I thought he had said something like that about the one next to it, which he took out three or four years ago. In spite of that one coming out, this one was in bad shape.
I can date the other one by where I was working at the time. One of the things I was doing at the time was processing CDs of Chinese text — newspapers on CD, mostly — to get rid of markup and have real text left for the language modeling people at Dragon to work with. About half of computer speech recognition is acoustic modeling, what speech sounds like, which is what I was mostly doing. The other half is language modeling, what words are people likely to be saying, and what words are likely to follow which others. For instance, “abetting” is probably going to be preceded by “aiding and”. If the computer hears something that might be “a bedding”, but the words it just recognized before that were “aiding and”, that next one is “abetting”, even though that’s a much less common word than “bedding” (I’m guessing — since I don’t work there any more, I don’t have access to the word frequency tables). And how does a computer tell the difference between “to”, “too”, and “two”? By what came before it, and maybe what came after it. “Two many” is unlikely to be what you said.
Anyway, I was processing, as I was saying, Chinese text so we could count how many times each word and each pair of words occurred. One day when I was talking with the Chinese woman who was in charge of the project I said that my dentist said I should have a tooth taken out, and that I wouldn’t notice any difference in how I could chew (that’s not the case with the one that came out today — I need it to chew on that side). She said that was probably true; that sometimes people in China who are going to emigrate to the U.S. are told that dental care is very expensive here, and that it’s a good idea to have all their teeth taken out and get false teeth. I looked at her again and saw that she had beautiful straight even teeth. Hmm. Well anyway, that’s how I remember when the tooth that was behind this one came out.