My job, in the ten hundred most used words

[toothycat]

Thanks to xkcd's post about the Saturn V rocket, explained using only the thousand words most used in the English language, and Theo Sanderson's Up-Goer Five text editorI work on problems people have with their ears. Some people lose their hearing as they get older, and this is what I study. People can lose their hearing for lots of reasons, like

Comments

[alextfish]

Fun! My job comes out as:

There are people that I work with who tell computers how to talk to lots of other computers, to get things done much faster than if there was only one computer. I look at their work and make sure it's all done right. I tell our computers how to check that the work these other people do is all okay, so our computers can check this every day. (So I tell computers how to tell other computers to talk to lots of /other/ computers.)

As you say, it's hard to convey the *interest*. But still a fun exercise. I like your explanation of genes!

[toothycat]

You have to use only the thousand most common words - use this to see which ones you aren't allowed ;)

[requiem_17_23]

I work on things which are very small, too small to see. They have a name but I can't say it here. They are used in computers and every kind of thing which can do stuff on its own. They are made of lots of tiny tiny little bits on top of one another.

I don't much care what the ones I make are used in (but I do know): it's my job to look at them when someone else has made them and see if they are good. And if they are not good I have to see if I can find out why they are not good and work out how we can fix that.

The thing about the ones that my friends and I make is that they don't have glass in them. Almost all of these things have glass in them. Ours don't and we are very good at making them.

One day someone will give us some money for one of them and we will all be very happy.

*

I was some way into a stab at an explanation of charge transport in organic semiconductors when I realised that I was having to cheat (use words that I knew were on the list but I wasn't going to use as metasyntactic variables) and gave up.