In what order would you naturally list the four suits of a pack of cards?

While I'm posting silly and inconsequential things, a fun thought occurred to me a couple of weeks ago. You know those price signs you get in supermarkets which advertise (for example) 1.5kg of flour for 41p, and then say ‘(27p per kg)’ so you don't have to work out the overall value for money yourself? It occurred to me that it would be fun to apply that to the clothes section: imagine a pair of shoes, and a price tag saying ‘£35.00 (£17.50 per shoe)’. Or better still, trousers: ‘(£11.00 per leg)’. It wouldn't do to be swindled by pack prices :-)

I've always been a little suspicious of attempts to design a human-like artificial intelligence. Of course it often leads to good SF, which I'm strongly in favour of :-) but many things which make good SF are not things you'd want to go round doing in reality.

In particular, I feel strongly that making a computer behave like a human mind misses the vital point about computers, which is that they're good at things humans are not, such as repeatability, reliability, extremely fast linear processing, not getting bored and so on. The most sensible way to use a computer, it therefore seems to me, is to apply it to jobs where those features are virtues, not to try to convert it into a second-rate human. Also, if you want a human-level intelligence, it's surely easier just to hire one: there are a silly number of billions of us in the world already, and quite a few are looking for work!

Every so often I notice a particularly unhelpful feature of the human brain which reinforces this opinion, by making me feel even more strongly that what we need is a partnership with devices which don't have the same weakness, not an attempt to construct yet more things which do.