Turboencabulators and Technobabble

and Happy April Fool's Day everyone. I'm Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with How Stuff Works in my Heart Radio, and I love all things tech and this episode should publish on April first, two thousand nineteen, unless my producer Tari has played in April Fool's Joke on me while I'm on vacation, and I thought, well, I could do another follow up episode on the various tech pranks that have been pulled since the last time I did a

prank roundup, which I think was in two thousand fifteen, But then I decided to focus on something else, a really amazing example of engineering. So there was a fellow who was named John Helen's Quick who published a piece at least as early as nineteen It was in a December edition of the British Institution of Electrical Engineers Students

Quarterly Journal. Now I say at least as early as nineteen forty four, because there's some people who say that it may have been published even earlier in some other journal by nineteen forty two, but it's super hard to track down. The earliest I found was this nineteen journal. The article is a masterpiece. It describes a transformative technology

called the turbo encabulator. Now, normally I wouldn't read out an entire piece, but in order to understand how important this is, I figured I would make an exception, and so here is Mr Quick's description of the turbo encabulator. For a number of years now, work has been proceeding in order to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a transmission that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also

be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal gram meters. Such an instrument is the turbo encabulator. Now, basically, the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it is produced by the modial interaction of magneto reluctance and capacitive diractants.

The original machine had a base plate of prefabriulated ammulite surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two sperving bearings were in a direct line with the pentometric fan. The ladder consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marsal vances, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar wainshaft

that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus o delta type, placed in penandermic semi boloid slots in the stature, every seventh conductor being connected by a non reversible trimmy pipe to the differential girdle spring on the up end of the gram meters forty one manestic league spaced grouding brushes were arranged to feed into the rotor slip stream a mixed of high s value phenel hydro benzamine and five percent ruminative tetralio hexamine.

Both these liquids have specific paracoustics given by p equals two times five c end to the six times seven, wherein is the diathetical evolute of retrograde temperature phase disposition and see is col Mondlaise annular grillage coefficient. Initially, n was measured with the aid of a metapolar refractive pilfometer, but up to the present date nothing has been found

to equal the transcendental hopper data scope. Electrical engineers will appreciate the difficulty of new being together the regurgative pur well and a supremitive went al sprocket. Indeed, this proved to be a stumbling block to further development until in nWo it was found that the use of anhydrous nangling

pins enabled a cryptognastic bowling him to be tankered. The early attempts to construct a sufficiently robust spiral dcommutator failed largely because of a lack of appreciation of the large quasi p stic stresses and Grimlin studs. The latter were specially designed to hold the roth Itt bars to the spam shaft. When, however, it was discovered that the winding could be prevented by a simple addition to the living sockets,

almost perfect running was secured. The operating point is maintained as near as possible to the h f rempeak by constantly formaging the bitumogeneous spandrels. This is a distinct advance on the standard nivel sheave. In the no dramcock oil is required after the phase detractors have been remissed. Undoubtedly, the turbo encabulator has now reached a very high level of technical development. It has been successfully used for operating

no fur trunions. In addition, wherever Barrissant score motion is required, it may be employed in conjunction with a drawn reciprocating dingle arm to reduce ying a soiled deplinoration. Now my guess is you just listen to me read off that let's say, remarkable description, and you're left with the obvious response of of course, that's that's blatantly obvious, that's old news.

Or perhaps you're having what was the intended response, you're confused as heck, Quick's piece was a tongue in cheek example of satire, highlighting how engineers would sometimes rely very heavily on jargon that you know, didn't seem to really mean anything, or purposefully obfuscated the functionality of a system, or maybe even cover up the engineer's own ignorance of how a system actually worked. Jargon does have some purposes, of course. Sometimes you need to create words to describe

something that didn't exist before. If you make a new device that fulfills a specific purpose, you need to have a name for it. You might need a name for the thing that the device actually does. Maybe whatever the device is doing is a brand new thing, so you've gotta have some word to describe it. Maybe what it does is a very specific instance of a more broad concept. So it's not doing a brand new thing, it's just doing a thing in a new way. So you create

words to help build in precision. You don't just mean a dingle angle. You might mean a one eighth hexagonal matrix dingle angle, so you call this particular component of a fronyon or whatever. With precision, you can more quickly communicate your exact needs or intentions to others within that field. But with that growing precision comes a knowledge gap between

the people in your field and everybody else. Now, in other cases, people rely on jargon not to convey specific meaning, but rather to come across as being more sophisticated or intelligent, or to make something more complicated than it really is. So I'm gonna give you guys some examples from my own life. In my life, before I ever was a podcaster, before I was a writer for how Stuff Works dot com,

I worked for a couple of different management consulting firms. Now, these were companies that were geared toward helping other companies assess manager styles or figure out what a corporate culture was within a certain business, to improve workplace efficiencies, that kind of thing. I was essentially working for the Bobs from Office Space. I guess you could say so if you're familiar with that film and the two consultants who come in and essentially start slashing jobs left and right.

I was kind of their employee in a roundabout way, although we didn't typically advocate for slashing huge numbers off of a corporate employee list. Occasionally, yes, but not frequently. So my work was focused on help in consultants produce proposals and reports. Largely, I was there to review, to proof, freed to format, and occasionally to tweak stuff. Now I

majored in English Lit when I was in college. I have a fairly extensive vocabulary, but frequently I would find myself working on documents that were so full of jargon that I would have to bring the documents over to a consultant and say, what exactly do you mean when you say this? You know, I would highlight a passage

and say what does this actually mean? Because I couldn't really edit or produce documents if I didn't understand the meaning because it might mean I could let something go out of the office that was incorrect, and it was incorrect because I didn't understand what was actually being meant and whether or not the consultant was accurate in their language.

So I would have to talk with these consultants on a very frank level and say, no, no, no, I understand what each individual word means in this sentence, but can you tell me what the overall meaning is? What are you actually getting at when you say this? And if they could tell me in plain English, then I would ask them, so, why don't you say it that way in this report? Why are you using language that is so complicated or non intuitive that what you actually

mean is hidden by that language? What good does that do you? My fear was that the consultants were writing these reports in a way to kind of hide the meaning because it gave them some wiggle room in the interpretations.

And I thought that was maybe a little disingenuous, Like if you could word a report in such a way that two different people could come away with two totally different interpretations, and both interpretations are seemingly valid because you were purposefully vague or Uh, using very weird jargon in your descriptions, then you haven't really done your job. You haven't actually helped them in any way, because no one has any consensus on what to do next. So I

found it very frustrating working in that world. Well, the same thing can happen with engineers, or really any profession that has its own jargon, from medicine to law, to

science to content creation on the Internet. I've been to plenty of meetings where there's been a lot of discussion about things on the Internet, where I felt it was being unnecessarily complicated, where people were talking about buckets and verticals, and they're talking about all sorts of things and deliverables and asking to dialogue with someone, And I kept thinking,

why are we using this language? There are other words we can use that everyone understands, that will convey exactly the meaning you you want, and yet we're progressively going to this this weird quasi language that that has a lot of ambiguity in it and therefore makes it harder to understand the meaning anyway. That was really what this piece was all about. There has to be a balance between precision that you get with the specific language that you were relying upon and clarity what you mean by

that language. So this piece by student John H. Quick was really meant to raise the reliance of jargon two ridiculous extremes, to say, if we really crank up the jargon speak in a piece, you realize how silly it can get. And the joke may well have died a quiet death on its own, or maybe only been something that engineers would joke about, just an inside joke among them,

if it hadn't been for Time Magazine. The Arthur d Old Industrial Bulletin in the United States would take this piece and publish it in ninety six, but that didn't exactly hit mainstream readership. It did, however, get some attention by people who would review technical documents, and in April of that year, Time Magazine ran the piece with the

title for No for Trunnions. It was produced without an overt nod that the whole thing was a wind up, and the people at Time Magazine knew it was a joke, but they were presenting it as if it were a realistic document. Some readers were legitimately flabbergasted. They thought it was meant as an actual example of engineering, but other people actually picked up on the joke and ran with it.

Stanton Tompkins, for example, wrote to Time Magazine and included the comment, may I add that if the bearings are lubricated with warm smorch, they will not grune. Others added equally nonsensical comments to push the joke further. One that's frequently mentioned is from a guy named Ernest In Kerman.

He wrote in and said, after being advised and cerebral lee malliated by one point five no fur trunnions from a magitudinitative zero four or five one gmt to an epin nocturnal proximate eleven fifty five e s T. I felt the need of spiri in animating filiperative and therefore submersonized my hypercincinate indoderm in a five percent Fijian nate by Carbo la kai nat ing Kepsi pola little slightly

veiled pepsi cola reference. They're still The joke could have faded away from memory after the Time Magazine piece weren't not for the determination of a few jokesters in the engineering world to give it a shot in the arm every few decades. Like the instrument department at General Electric they wrote up an entire data sheet on the fictional turbo encabulator. More on that in just moment, but first

let's take a quick break. On December one, nineteen sixty two, the Instrument Department at GE released a fact sheet on the turbo encabulator. By the way, I've seen turbo encabulator presented as both a single word and as two words as turbo incabulator, so dealer's choice. I guess both appear throughout engineering joke literature. The fact sheet, however, really helps clear things up. For example, the function of the turbo

encabulator is made clear by this fact sheet. It's quote to measure inverse reactive current in unilateral phase detractors with a display of percent realization end quote. So finally we know what's going on, right. Much of the fact sheet is drawn directly from Quick's description of the turbo encabulator

from back. Other parts gleefully build upon the nonsense. For example, there is a section on the fact sheet about the application of the device that reads, quote caution because of the replenorative flow characteristics of positive ions and unilateral phase detractors, the use of quasi static regeneration oscillator is recommended if

turbo encabulator is used in explosive atmospheres. End quote. The fact sheet actually includes an image of the supposed device, the first image that I could actually find on record this version. If you were to look at it looks kind of like a cylinder mounted on its side on a small stand, so think of like a like a water bottle, but you have it on its side. On one end of this cylinder is a fan that sticks

out of the end. There's a length of piping that stretches across the top of the turbo encabulator, so again like it would be the side of the cylinder, but the top of the device. And there's some other details on this as well, although it's hard to make out because I've only seen scans of the original document and they tend to be pretty low quality scans, so it's

hard to make out details. The entire write up followed the format of official g E standards for product documentation, so the people who made this actually made it so it looked exactly like any standard g E documentation. They followed all the rules and it was inserted into the official GE handbook. Now I'm sure that those who painstaking lee read through the entire handbook were amused or maybe

befuddled by the joke. Also, I feel this is a good place to say that it pays to read through employee handbooks because you never know when someone's going to slip in a joke. And as someone who has actually designed employee handbooks in the past, I'd also say it is incredibly satisfying to put jokes into official materials, you know, so long as those jokes aren't going to backfire on you. So I would actually recommend getting official approval before getting

wacky with the official handbook. It is good to see why a in those cases. Still, at this point, we're talking about print representations of this ridiculous notion. In ninety seven, the Turbo Encabulator made the transition from page to screen. An actor named Bud Haggart, who was well known for voiceover and industrial film performances, took on the role of an engineer delivering a matter of fact explanation of the turbo Encabulator. The script was nearly word for word Quick's

original piece in ninety four. It was edited a bit but had essentially the same flow, and it was helped with meaningless diagrams and sketches that Haggard would point to throughout his delivery as if he was actually pointing at the physical components of this fictional device. His tone and approach made it so like he was talking about something that any kid could understand with relative ease. It was brilliant.

According to Internet lore, Hanard proposed doing the short as an add on after an official short film for GMC was shot. It was an industrial film about one of their truck lines. So he goes in. He does this commercial shoot for GMC about their truck lines, and he works with the film crew, and then afterwards he takes the film crew aside. He talks to the director, whose name was Dave Ron Dutt, and he asks them to stay after so that he might shoot a short film

that is based off the turbo encabulator piece. Haggard had actually written the script based on that n article and made it something that he could create a presentation out of. And industrial films were something of a of a big deal in the seventies and eighties, and they could actually make the rounds within an industry. So this nineteen seventies seven fake industrial film that Haggard made made the rounds,

and some folks over at Chrysler saw it. So in Chrysler hired Haggard to come over and shoot a new version of his turbo encabulator presentation at Chrysler's facility, and it was purporting to be a new product from the auto company. In this case, he had some actual machinery to gesture toward while delivering his presentation, but none of the things he was pointing to had anything to do

with what he was actually saying. Cat's cuttle fish to the second oil age and his kingdom with fur of darkness. I don't dispute the eurostata, but if he's down here, not blood but darkness, the earth's black riches, I could taste it on my lips. Today, I want to talk to you about the science of transgenesis Genesis time show. WHOA. I'm not sure what what happened just there? That was That was odd um? All right? Well, getting back into

it talking about the films. Both the original video or film rather that Haggard shot and the Chrysler version of the presentation are available online. You can watch both of them and you can find them on YouTube. You can find them on other platforms as well, And there is no way at all that I could deliver the techno babble with the same dead pan skill as Mr Haggard. It is a masterpiece of dead pan humor. It's also pretty clear that he wasn't using any Q cards or

a teleprompter. His eyes hold steady the entire time. They don't have the tell tale scanning motions you get when you're watching someone who's reading from Q cards or a teleprompter. If you've ever watched Saturday Night Live, if you ever even watched videos that I have done. I've done several videos without a teleprompter, and I've done videos with teleprompters. And if you watch my eyes, you can tell which one you're seeing because you can see that I'm actually

reading something on the teleprompter one. So I get really sensitive to this kind of thing. I notice it pretty quickly, I think most people do, but it jumps out at me. So I wondered at first how he did it, Like, how did he actually memorize this incredibly dense list of jargon. Well, according to the director Ron Dot, the nineteen seventy seven version was done with an audio prompter. It was a wired earpiece that connected to a real to real tape recorder.

Uh so Haggard had gone and recorded the entire speech on to the reel to reel and he used the earpiece as a prompter for himself. Now, I can't imagine how difficult that was to do at pace where you're delivering it right after you're hearing it. Because if you've ever tried to speak well hearing your own audio, you know that that can get really difficult. You can find

it very disorienting and disconcerting. So maybe he practiced it enough to speak the piece in time with the recorded version, sort of like singing along to the radio when a song is playing, you might find that, oh, I know all the lyrics when I sing along to the radio, but if you asked me to try and sing the lyrics on my own without the song playing, suddenly I start having trouble. Maybe it was something like that, I

don't know. The Chrysler video has a follow up part and there's another actor who talks about the diagnosis and service of the turbo encabulator. That segment includes even more techno babble and jargon, adding yet more complexity to the overall joke. Now, I'm not going to go into the whole script like I did with the original publication, but I do want to point out a couple of favorite

parts of mine. The presenter says, for the purposes of obscurity, we have removed the casing to expose the heart of the turbo encabulator, the magneto reluctance modial interactor. Since little or nothing is known about the principles involved in magneto reluctance, diagnosing faults can be a problem that to me is absolutely hysterical. The notion that we have built an important piece of technology without an understanding of the underlying science

that makes it work is already pretty amusing. So yeah, if you don't understand how something works, how would you know when something is wrong. There's also a terrible pun in that segment, in which the presenter says a diagnostic tool will display any faults in code, adding quote it's a simple head code. Anyone can catch it end quote That in turn might be a bit of a joke theft, because I actually recall that the absurdist radio comedy group Fire Sign Theater had a similar joke about a simple

schoolboy code that anyone could catch. In general, the Chrysler video makes it more apparent that the whole thing is done for laughs. It is less of a uh, it's it's less done as a serious piece the original piece. If you didn't know better, if you were completely naive about engineering, you might think, while this is just I don't understand any of it. I have no idea what this thing does. But if you know what he's talking about, or at least no enough to know that it's nonsense,

then it's a joke. Well, in this case, the Chrysler version is more obviously a joke. Another video that will pop up if you search for turbo encabulator is from Rockwell Automation, produced in nine, which tells us that seems like we get a new version every decade or so, because the first one came out in nineteen seventy seven, the next one came out in the late eighties, and then you have nine or so for the third one.

The company Rockwell Automation started at the big ending of the twentieth century, a different company name, but what would evolve into Rockwell Automation traces its history back that far. The company creates industrial automation technology for other companies, so it's not exactly the place you would expect to find humor. But Rockwell produced their own video in the spirit of

the Turbo Encabulator, this time called the Retro Encabulator. Actor Mike Craft served as the host of the video, and Craft had done presentations at industry conferences and events on behalf of companies like Alan Bradley for years. Craft had discovered the Bud Haggart piece many years earlier and had memorized it, and I didn't realize it at first when

I was watching it. But Craft also was the repair technician who did the follow up segment in Haggart's Chrysler video, so he actually got to work with Bud Haggart at Chrysler and then was able to do the full presentation over at Rockwell. Also, like Haggard, Craft used an ear prompter, although at this point we were talking about a wireless one, not a fired one. Like the Chrysler video, the Rockwell one makes use of actual devices to illustrate the point.

With Chrysler, the device would be like transmission parts, you know, they were car parts, but with Rockwell it was actually electrical wall panels. That Craft was opening up and using

to illustrate his fictional points. The video also featured shoutouts to Rockwell customers like Dodge, Alan Bradley and Alliance Electric, and claiming that the incabulator was really a joint effort between these different companies, but the description of the device was again largely the same as the original nineteen forty four Right up, and you should check out retro incabulator dot com because you'll be directed to Mic Craft's acting website.

The joke survives to this day with side shows Hank Green delivering a performance just a few years ago, I think two thousand thirteen, and there was an April Fool's Day joke and he again delivers it exactly the way you would expect Hank Green to do it per lely,

and it does a masterful job as well. Those of you who remember my series Forward Thinking, you might be amused to know that our series director, Dan Bush wanted me to do a version of the turbo encabulator as an April Fool's joke for the show, to do a full Forward Thinking episode about the turbo encabulator. We never could get clear approval to move forward on that, so it never happened. I guess I should be thankful, because I'm absolutely certain shooting a video version of that would

have required countless takes to get it right. In fact, I imagine I would still be in the studio today if that were the case. So that's the story about the turbo encabulator. But I've got more to say about jargon and techno babble in just a moment. But let's take another quick break, all right, So let's talk a bit about techno babble or sometimes known as techno speak, which you could call a trope. Trope means a couple

of different things. Yes, I should really define what I mean by it, since I'm talking all about being precise and clear. So in this case, a trope, as I'm I'm using it, refers to some sort of common literary or rhetorical device, something that is used frequently enough to be part of a common language or even a cliche. Uh, it doesn't even have to be language. It can be a specific sort of events. So a horror movie trope, a very common horror movie trope might be something like

let's split up. You see that in horror movies all the time. You already know what that means. When when characters say let's split up, you know that means that whatever the the antagonist is in the horror movie, whether it's a slasher or a ghost or goblins or whatever it might be, they're gonna get somebody because they split up and they're more vulnerable. So splitting up is always a great idea in the context of a horror movie. And you can subvert tropes too. You don't have to

just fulfill tropes. You could do a horror movie where you say let's split up. Everyone splits up, and then everyone is fine until they get back together again. Then you have subverted the trope. But that you're you're depending on the audience being aware that there is a trope, that you have subverted their expectations. But the reason they have the expectations is because the trope existed in the

first place. So techno speak is one of those devices used by writers to create what sounds like a sophisticated explanation of a technology but tends to be total nonsense, or the very least is overly complicated and verbose. So I thought I would include some of my favorite examples and include a little context as well, and I don't

want to cast too much shade here. It is really challenging to write science fiction in a believable way because you're typically describing things that don't exist in our real world. Maybe they exist in some warm but you're talking about a more advanced version, or maybe you're talking about a brand new technology that has no basis in reality as as it stands right now, and you have to find words to describe it. And you don't want it to

sound like Caveman trying to describe television. You want to sound like it exists within the time and place that you have set your story. So you have to have that balance. How do you create words and phrases that have meaning within your world and aren't just seen as being complete nonsense to everybody else. I don't have the answer to that question, By the way. This is a hard thing to do. So there's some stiff competition around

various franchises for the most frequent use of techno speak. Now, I personally would give the trophy over to the Star Trek franchise, not the original series so much because I believe it or not, Star Trek the original series wasn't quite so flagrant about throwing around jargon. You got some, but not tons of it. It wasn't like it was really,

you know ingrained in every single episode. The show did feature fictional technologies like warp drives, phasers, transporters, those sort of things, but you didn't get a lot of techno babble about those things. You might just get fire the phasers. Then Star Trek the Next Generation debuted, and initially it was similar to the original series, and it was fairly light on techno speak. But then after the series creator Gene Roddenberry passed away, and after the Star Trek Technical

Manual came out. The technical manual attempted to give valid explanations for how all the technology and Star Trek the Next Generation actually worked, which meant it was largely a work of speculative fiction in of itself. Once those two things happened, writers began to insert more and more techno babble into the show. And, like I said, it's a pretty tough gig. You They had to describe technology that would exist centuries from today. It's hard enough to predict

what's going to happen in five years. Anyone who's listened to my technology prediction episodes. Know that it's hard enough to describe what's going to happen in the next year, let alone three hundred years from now, and so there was some imaginative use of terminology that was necessary, but the writers kind of went a little nutty with it in the later seasons of the Next Generation and then

the following Star Trek series. I haven't gone through every episode of the Next Generation to keep it tally, but the example that always leaps to my mind with Star Trek the Next Generation is the ubiquitous reverse the polarity. The phrase was used as sort of a get out of crisis free card on episodes where the usual approach,

whatever that might be, wasn't working. So, for example, if the Enterprise encountered an enemy Borg vessel that was attacking, the bridge, crew might try to reverse the polarity on the ship's shields to help repel the attack. Now, to be fair, the Star Trek writers didn't invent the idea of reversing the polarity. It had already had a distinguished run on the venerable UK series Doctor Who. Fans of classic Doctor Who, I'm talking about Doctor Who before the

reboot with Eccleston and Tennant and all the rest. You might remember John Pertwee, who played the third doctor in the series. Reverse the polarity and later on, reverse the polarity of the neutron flow became a common phrase in Doctor Who episodes, finding its way across multiple doctors as the series continued, including doctors after the reboot. Peter Capaldi's doctor even subverted this trope in an episode in which he said, quote, reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.

I bet that means something. It sounds great end quote. One of the critics is ms I've seen about Star Trek in general was that the reliance on meaningless techno speak acted as sort of a dios x makina literally in this sense, to get the crew out of danger without actually coming up with an approach that has any relevant meaning to the audience. Essentially, it was saying, the thing you're doing isn't working. Do the thing you're doing,

but do it differently. I did the thing differently, it worked, we got away. That's not very satisfying once you strip away the techno babble. The techno babble helped kind of hide the weakness of that resolution. Other examples included routing an inverse takeion pulse through the main deflector dish that makes no sense of Tachyon is a hypothetical particle that

can move faster than the speed of light. I have no idea what an inverse tachion would be, but that's one of the big examples that I tend to think about Star Trek. However, science fiction is not the only source of techno babble. There are others. Thrillers and procedurals also revel in techno babble. From time to time. Characters like Chloe O'Brien in twenty four or Abbey And in c I S frequently speak in techno babble, only to have someone else in the scene asked them to repeat

what they said, quote unquote in English. Now frequently the English translation for the techno speak doesn't actually match up with whatever the techno speak was, which means the tech speak was totally superfluous. Though you could argue the writers were including it to try and create some sort of credibility for the character as an expert in his or her field, and not actually meant to move the story along.

But to me, it's almost like you're treading water. You're having a character say, at least reportedly, say the same thing two different ways, except in reality they're saying nonsense one way and then something that makes sense the other way. Why would they not just use plain English in the first place? Now? Pretty sure that Shannon Morse and I Shannon Morse of Hack five covered some atrocious examples of

techno babble in our episode about hacking in Hollywood. In fact, I remember that we specifically covered this one, but I want to talk about it again. One of my favorite examples of techno babble and hacking Hollywood style would be from c s I New York. It was from an episode called Taxi in which a character named Lindsay says, I'll create a g uy Actually, she says gooey. I'll create a gooey interface using visual basic see if I can track an IP address. So that's so wrong, It

is hilariously wrong. This clip is available to watch on YouTube. If you're so inclined, you can just see that in this brief moment it lasts less than three seconds. I'll create a gooey interface using visual basics, see if I can track an IP address. It is so silly. Let's go through it step by step to kind of see how ridiculous this techno babble is. First of all, Lindsay says she's going to create a gooey interface that's already repetitive. It's like saying a T M machine or pen number.

Gooey is g u I and it stands for graphical user interface. So she's going to create a graphical user interface interface, according to what she says. Also, a gooey is just a way to interact with the device. That's what interface means. It's the way you interface with your technology. It facilitates computer commands. It doesn't do anything special. It just allows you to do whatever you need to do on a device. But it itself is just a facilitator. So Windows is a gooey mac Os is a gooey.

Smartphone user interfaces are gooey's because your your programs are represented by icons their pictures. Then you can click or press on the pictures and activate them and it launches into a program. But that's all it is. That's what the interface is. This is in contrast, by the way, with text based interfaces, in which you would have to type in commands and file names to get stuff done.

So you might have to say run such and such dot e x c, and that would send a command to your computer to find that e x C file and to initiate it, whereas on a gooey you just click on whatever the icon is that represents that that particular program. As for visual Basic, that's the next part of Lindsay's line. Visual Basic was a programming language. I guess you could say it is a programming language, but

we'll get to that. So I guess you could argue that that part of her statement made some sense, I suppose. But visual Basic relies on a gooey visual Basic. The reason why it's called visual is because it's a gooey interface to be repetitive again, to do programming. So a programmer would use visual Basic to create code, choosing snippets of code that was written in the basic programming language.

Thus the name visual basic. Basic was designed as an educational tool primarily, and it made the transition to legacy status Visual Basic did in two thousand eight. So, in other words, this was a pretty limited programming language. It was a good tool for learning the basics of programming, but it wasn't exactly the most sophisticated or versatile programming language out there. Also, the c s I New York episode aired in two thousand eight, the same year Visual

Basic was sunsetted as a legacy programming language. So now you've got Lindsay saying she's going to make a gooy with an outdated programming language. And by now it should be pretty obvious that an interface, even one so amazing that it was built in Visual Basic, wouldn't be able to track an IP address at all. It's just an interface.

It doesn't do anything other than act as a facilitator. Moreover, there's no shortage of ways to track I P addresses at Just looking at a server that's being contacted is enough, because the incoming traffic has to have an IP address associated with it, because that's how data communication works. Now, you might not have an accurate IP address. Someone might be using proxies but or VPNs and thus hiding their

true IP addresses. But that's different. So that one throway line and c s I has led to tons of jokes on the Internet, including various attempts to build out what would be a gooey in Visual basics. So there are a lot of visual gags out there. If you just do a search for CSI, New York g u I, you're gonna see a ton of them. Now, sometimes the techno speak that a character says actually does mean something

or almost mean something. So, for example, in the series Arrow, the character Felicity in one episode says, I have to break through the processor's protective firewall to stop cadence virus and the fact that the processor is exponentially overclocking and he's disabled the cooling system. And then she's interrupted by Green Arrow, who says he didn't understand any of that. Well, that particular sentence at least has some elements that makes sense. All of the things she says are real things, but

the exponential overclocking would have to be an exaggeration. Processors have limits they cannot go beyond, even with overclocking. Um a processor has clock cycles essentially means how many instructions can this processor complete within a given amount of time, and and processor manufacturers create limits, like they make a hard limit for the number of processes per second that a clock can handle. But you can remove those limits

with processors. That's what you call overclocking. You can make processors actually uh fulfill more instructions per second than they were rated for, at least up to a point. Eventually you reach whatever the maximum is that that processor can handle even with overclocking. So exponential is likely not the right word that would they'll be way too much. I doubt that any microprocess or manufacturer out there builds in enough capacity and then limits it enough for you to

have exponential overclocking. Also, you wouldn't really have a firewall around a processor. Firewalls fit between internal and external networks. It's meant to protect the internal network from harmful forces from the outside, so like from the Internet. So a firewall would sit on a connection between machines and the Internet, but not so far down as the processor level. Still, I would say that this was a decent attempt at

making a meaningful statement. It didn't fully hit the target, but again close, which is not great for a guy who uses arrows as his main means of weaponry. Anyway, there were two reasons I really wanted to talk about the turbo encabulator and techno babble. The first is I think the turbo encabulator is a pretty funny joe that pokes fun at the very human trade of trying to

make stuff sound important. The second is that it reminds us this sort of language is used all the time, and not just an entertainment, not just to create things that make people sound smart. We run into it in marketing materials all the time, real world marketing materials aimed at selling stuff to us. So it's good to remember this sort of stuff is meant to dazzle us while

not actually saying anything of substance. It's another example of why we should practice critical thinking whenever we can, because it could help us avoid making a really dumb decision because we were so impressed with what sounded like a sophisticated description that we never looked into it any further. This teaches us to learn what the actual definitions for words are, both the official definitions and the contextual definitions, and we know what they mean and what they do

not mean. So words like quantum, which is forly overused and misused to a criminal level, is a dead giveaway that you need to pay really close attention. Or words like organic or natural. Heck, words like smart when applied to technology or other products, those are all things that

mean you should probably take a closer look. It doesn't necessarily mean that the people who make that thing are out to fool you, but they might be taking some shortcuts when they're describing whatever it is they do, and you it's it's good to take that extra step to find out what is actually meant by that language. Being aware of techno babble makes it more challenging for other

people to take advantage of you. It does not make you bulletproof, but it might mean you could sidestep a lie or a prank that might otherwise take you in. And I think that's a pretty valuable lesson for an April Fool's Day. And well, that wraps up this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can get

in touch with me send me an email. The address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can pop on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find links to our social media presence over there, as well as a link to our online store. Every purchase you make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it. And I'll talk to you again. Release soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com