1942: Without ever sighting one another, Japanese and American task forces engage near the Midway Atoll, marking the turning point of the Pacific war and ringing down the curtain on the battleship as a dominant offensive naval weapon.

The Battle of Midway began only a month after the inconclusive Battle of the Coral Sea, which was the first time two opposing fleets slugged it out without making visual contact. Airplanes, specifically the dive bomber and the torpedo plane, were the weapons that made this possible and changed the nature of war at sea.

As a result, aircraft carriers now emerged as the most important ships in the fleet, relegating other surface ships to carrier-escort and picket duty, and -- in the case of the battleship and heavy cruiser -- to shore bombardment in support of troop landings.

At Midway, the Japanese committed most of their fleet to the battle they believed would sweep the Americans from the seas, giving them time to consolidate their burgeoning Asian empire and extend their defensive perimeter into the central Pacific. Four fleet carriers -- Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu -- formed two strike forces intended to reduce the American fleet, which would then be destroyed by the battleships.

The American aircraft carriers, which were spared destruction at Pearl Harbor by being at sea that Dec. 7, were the primary targets.

The success of the complex Japanese plan -- devised by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor raid -- rested on deception. Because of this it was bound to failure before a shot was fired, since, unbeknownst to the Japanese, the Americans had broken their naval code and were able to anticipate Yamamoto's every move.

Coupled with this was the fact that Japan's own intelligence proved poor, underestimating the size of the American fleet, and particularly the number of aircraft carriers available to the enemy.

The battle lasted three-and-a-half days. When it was over, all four Japanese carriers had been lost, a number of other surface ships had also been sunk or damaged, and many of the best air crews were dead. The Americans lost the aircraft carrier Yorktown and a number of air crews, but were in far better shape than the Japanese to make good their losses.

The Imperial Japanese Navy was effectively broken at Midway. Although it would remain a formidable force into 1944, it was no longer a dominant one.

Source: U.S. Navy, Wikipedia

According to some people, there are only 36 basic story plots that just get reused. Others say there are merely 20. Some people even say there's only one plot, but they probably just watch too many Michael Bay movies. I like the theory that there are only seven plots. It's a nice round number, and the plots are vague enough that you can shoehorn anything from Citizen Kane to a cereal commercial into them.

In the spirit of oversimplifying things so that you can smugly shove human endeavors into pre-labeled slots, I'd like to present my own, contemporary take on this premise: the Seven Basic Blog Posts.

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Terrible things are happening in one of the following: the world, the web or a television show you really like. Make a blog post about it! People will comment about how much they agree with you. Then they'll make their own blog posts about the subject, and other people will comment about how much they agree with them. If we all work together we'll learn that we can make a real impact on our pageviews.

For too long, the mainstream media have shoved advertising down our throats. It's time for us to take the reins of mass communication and shove advertising down each other's throats! If we both see the same overproduced movies and lust after the same overpriced devices, then maybe the bitter wind of loneliness won't bite quite so fiercely.

Nobody likes animals when they act like animals. Videos of a cat snapping a robin's neck don't go big. No, we like animals when we can convince ourselves that they're just like us, only with worse spelling. For the purposes of this category, animals also includes babies and children younger than 8.

Try this: Put up videos of yourself volunteering at a soup kitchen, giving a speech at a symposium and breaking your arm in seven places doing the "shopping cart luge." Guess which one will get the most hits. We like our animals to appear smarter than they really are and our humans dumber, which means that the perfect internet celebrity would be a somewhat slow-witted centaur. In a Darth Vader outfit.

Liking new things takes so much effort. You have to learn all these unfamiliar characters or remember completely new lyrics. It's much easier to like something that you already know about. The Matrix -- in cookie form! The Lord of the Rings -- if Frodo was a ninja! The Mario Bros. theme song -- played on the hollowed-out skulls of owls! We're already starting to see this undergo a third iteration: Star Wars, only with homemade lightsabers, only in a Weezer video! In about 10 seconds, someone's going to make a Lego version of that video, bringing it to the fourth level.

This includes homemade experiments involving explosives, as well as actual scientific studies. There are two types of scientific studies: Ones you agree with, and ones you don't. If you disagree with a study, you should link to it and point out how stupid and biased it is. If you agree, you should link to it and point out how ridiculous it is that scientists get paid to state the obvious. Either way, you're educating your readers that you're smarter than science.

We've reached an age where egotism is considered too much work. Why discuss your hopes and fears when you can just post the results of online tests, show cartoon versions of yourself and collect "friends"? It's a good thing Anais Nin wasn't a blogger, or instead of a steamy tale of sexual awakening and creative fervor, we'd just know that if she was a Ninja Turtle, she'd be Raphael.

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a blogger, a logger and an otter.

Speech technology has long languished in the no-man's land between sci-fi fantasy ("Computer, engage warp drive!") and disappointing reality ("For further assistance, please say or press 1 ...").

But that's about to change, as advances in computing power make voice recognition the next big thing in electronic security and user-interface design.

A whole host of highly advanced speech technologies, including emotion and lie detection, are moving from the lab to the marketplace.

"This is not a new technology," says Daniel Hong, an analyst at Datamonitor who specializes in speech technology. "But it took a long time for Moore's Law to make it viable."

Hong estimates that the speech technology market is worth more than $2 billion, with plenty of growth in embedded and network apps.

It's about time. Speech technology has been around since the 1950s, but only recently have computer processors grown powerful enough to handle the complex algorithms that are required to recognize human speech with enough accuracy to be useful.

There are already several capable voice-controlled technologies on the market. You can issue spoken commands to devices like Motorola's Mobile TV DH01n, a mobile TV with navigation capabilities, and TomTom's GO 920 GPS navigation boxes. Microsoft recently announced a deal to slip voice-activation software into cars manufactured by Hyundai and Kia, and its TellMe division is investigating voice-recognition applications for the iPhone. And Indesit, Europe's second-largest home appliances manufacturer, just introduced the world's first voice-controlled oven.

Yet as promising as this year's crop of voice-activated gadgets may be, they're just the beginning.

Speech technology comes in several flavors, including the speech recognition that drives voice-activated mobile devices; network systems that power automated call centers; and PC applications like the MacSpeech Dictate transcription software I'm using to write this article.

Voice biometrics is a particularly hot area. Every individual has a unique voice print that is determined by the physical characteristics of his or her vocal tract. By analyzing speech samples for telltale acoustic features, voice biometrics can verify a speaker's identity either in person or over the phone, without the specialized hardware required for fingerprint or retinal scanning.

The technology can also have unanticipated consequences. When the Australian social services agency Centrelink began using voice biometrics to authenticate users of its automated phone system, the software started to identify welfare fraudsters who were claiming multiple benefits -- something a simple password system could never do.

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council has issued guidance requiring stronger security than simple ID and password combinations, which is expected to drive widespread adoption of voice verification by U.S. financial institutions in coming years. Ameritrade, Volkswagen and European banking giant ABN AMRO all employ voice-authentication systems already.

Speech recognition systems that can tell if a speaker is agitated, anxious or lying are also in the pipeline.

Computer scientists have already developed software that can identify emotional states and even truthfulness by analyzing acoustic features like pitch and intensity, and lexical ones like the use of contractions and particular parts of speech. And they are honing their algorithms using the massive amounts of real-world speech data collected by call centers.

A reliable, speech-based lie detector would be a boon to law enforcement and the military. But broader emotion detection could be useful as well.

For example, a virtual call center agent that could sense a customer's mounting frustration and route her to a live agent would save time, money and customer loyalty.

"It's not quite ready, but it's coming pretty soon," says James Larson, an independent speech application consultant who co-chairs the W3C Voice Browser Working Group.

Companies like Autonomy eTalk claim to have functioning anger and frustration detection systems already, but experts are skeptical. According to Julia Hirschberg, a computer scientist at Columbia University, "The systems in place are typically not ones that have been scientifically tested."

According to Hirschberg, lab-grade systems are currently able to detect anger with accuracy rates in "the mid-70s to the low 80s."

They are even better at detecting uncertainty, which could be helpful in automated training contexts. (Imagine a computer-based tutorial that was sufficiently savvy to drill you in areas you seemed unsure of.)

Lie detection is a tougher nut to crack, but progress is being made.

In a study funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security, Hirschberg and several colleagues used software tools developed by SRI to scan statements that were known to be either true or false. Scanning for 250 different acoustic and lexical cues, "We were getting accuracy maybe around the mid- to upper-60s," she says.

That may not sound so hot, but it's a lot better than the commercial speech-based lie detection systems currently on the market. According to independent researchers, such "voice stress analysis" systems are no more reliable than a coin-toss.

It may be awhile before industrial-strength emotion and lie detection come to a call center near you. But make no mistake: They are coming. And they will be preceded by a mounting tide of gadgets that you can talk to -- and argue with.

Don't be surprised if, some day soon, your Bluetooth headset tells you to calm down. Or informs you that your last caller was lying through his teeth.