Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Are you bumpin' me?

Now, I am stunned! You're not gonna believe this. This bump app for the iPhone I was telling you earlier??? What would you say if I told you that my speculative 'pipe' was no good?! Take a look at this company's faq. That's what these folks say about how their app works!

Q: How does BumpTM work?
A: There are two parts to BumpTM: the app running on your device and a smart matching algorithm running on our servers in the cloud. The app on your phone uses the phone's sensors to literally "feel" the bump, and it sends that info up to the cloud. The matching algorithm listens to the bumps from phones around the world and pairs up phones that felt the same bump. Then we just route the contact information between the two phones in each pair.

Can you figure this? You bump under the impression that your personal data jumps off your iPhone a few inches away into your partner's and you get his/her data into yours (hermaphroditic pipe connexion sort-a-thing) but the darn things have gone on a tour around the planet to be matched by these folks' algorithms and sent back. Now I get it why they need to feel the bump 'simultaneously'. It's a question of physics. Two events are identical when they occur at the same point in the four dimensional time-space. The two devices send out their identity almost simultaneously following the sensor reactions from the bump, along with location info (this might be a problem for iPod touch or even the iPhones if their location has not been recently updated ) so that these folks' algorithms can do the 'QED math' necessary to match the 'bump'ers. So, if you wanna mess up their algo's bump three phones at the same time... like wineglasses! I'd like to know then whom of the three their formulas will pick as the 'odd-one-out'! It's probably a cool game for teens when a dude has to decide whom of two broads he chooses to take to the proms.

It's so funny what they say in one of their own faq questions. It's about bump identity matching where they're like:

Q: No way. What if somebody else bumps at the same time?
A: Way. We use various techniques to limit the pool of potential matches, including location information and characteristics of the bump event. If you are bumping in a particularly dense area (ex, at a conference), and we cannot resolve a unique match after a single bump, we'll just ask you to bump again. Our CTO has a PhD in Quantum Mechanics and can show the math behind that, but we suggest downloading BumpTM and trying it yourself!

Ain't this a scream? What a better way to tell us: Dudes, trust us, we're Einstein's siblings (or Feynman's for that matter).

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