Aware

2008.09.16   prev     next

“Daddy, when I turn my head upside down, it looks like I’m going to fall into the sky!” exclaims my five-year-old son.

“Yes, it does,” I reply, “and does it look like the trees are hanging off the bottom of the planet?”

“Yeah!!” he says after trying it again.

So I think I’ll take a picture of trees hanging off the bottom of the planet. I turn my iPhone upside down and snap a shot.

But when I go to the photo browser, I discover to my surprise that the trees are upside-up. Oh, wow, the iPhone could tell it was upside down when I shot the picture, and it rotated the image accordingly. OK, I’ll just turn the phone upside down now, then show the picture to my boy. But as soon as I do — the picture spins around 180° and is once again right-side up! Because, of course, the iPhone always knows its orientation, whether you’re shooting pictures, or viewing them, and it keeps everything upside-up as it thinks I want.

Fortunately, I found that I could simply lay the iPhone flat on a table, then orient it towards my boy so that the trees are upside-down to him.

Perhaps I should be miffed that I ran afoul of technology trying to help me (like that annoying, automatic space-insertion when I paste a word) — trying to be “too smart” — but instead I am strangely delighted to see the trees magically stay upright despite my best efforts to make them point down. It’s a bit eerie and magical when a tech device seems to be aware of what’s going on around it.