Protect Us from Ourselves

A few weeks ago, a new Google Labs feature for their Gmail system made some news. They called it "mail goggles" and the tag line was "Stop sending mail you later regret". The announcement said that one of their engineers wanted to keep from sending pleas to his ex-girlfriend when he wasn\´t thinking straight, so he came up with a simple test. I checked my calendar — no, it wasn\´t April 1st — but I still couldn\´t help thinking this was an odd joke. Nope! Sure enough, if I go to the Labs page from my Gmail account, I see that the feature exists, with examples of simple — but not too simple — math problems it might pose.