WHAT MACHINES KNOW.

• Author: RUNDLES, JEFF

During one of those glorious Autumn days we had this year when the temperatures soared more than 20 degrees above normal, I was sitting outside eating lunch when a guy, dressed in a shirt and tie, walked by ranting and raving and flailing his arms. Just a few years ago anybody, save those people who claim God or Satan commands them, would have taken the guy for a pure lunatic.

These days, as it turns out, he's just a lunatic with a hands-free cell phone. It would be helpful in this modern age if we all had some technological advancement that could detect the true lunatics. Hey, it would be nice to have some technology that would detect all sorts of things. Like, on sales calls people could have a kind of "sell-likely/not-likely" detector, so you wouldn't have to waste a bunch of time with someone who isn't going to buy no matter what the pitch. This detector could also give you a little twinge when it's time to bring out the contract for the close.

Or a detector for us.journalists that would immediately detect windbags. It would automatically cut through the trappings of, say, a business card that says "President," and send out a little charge signifying it would be time to end the interview. The only down side would be when banking reporters get this detector and then die of electrocution on the first day.

This isn't as far-fetched as you might think. Coca-Cola announced a couple of months ago that it was developing a pop machine that would detect the temperature and then automatically raise prices when it got hot outside, when, presumably, the demand would be higher. Gasoline stations have been using a low-tech method of this for years; at the end of each week they call their station clerks and hint that it's Friday -- that's the detection part -- - and then the prices go up for the high-demand weekends. The clerks then somehow detect that Monday comes around and lower the prices back.

It's not much of a leap to imagine that pop machines could detect even more than temperature. They could, for instance, detect that it is morning and raise the prices on...