I’m on record for several disparaging remarks about the effectiveness of advertising in in-flight magazines and in-flight radio programs, so I was as surprised as anybody when I actually ripped out and saved this bit from JAL’s Skyward magazine:

If the fine print is too fine, I’ll summarize: People in Japan are getting fatter, and some healthcare outfit is piloting a program where users send in cameraphone pictures of things they’re considering eating, and the service sends back nutrition information to help guide the would-be dieters.

I was hoping this would be an application of some fancy food-recognition AI, (Something like IBM research’s super-cool Veggie Vision) but it seems to be dependent on a bank of nutritionists, so it’s not as scalable as I had hoped.

Seems like a useful service in any case. I wonder which will evolve first, food-recognition AI, or calorie and cholesterol detectors for mobile phones?

Here are eight things I considered consuming over the last few weeks. I ingested seven of them. Can you guess the odd one out?