ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT.

Our friend Father Pitt tells us that Google Photos loves to remind you of your most precious memories from years gone by. Above the endless scroll of pictures will be “Recent Highlights,” “1 year ago,” “2 years ago,” and so on.

How does Google guess which memories might be most precious to its users? We have no idea. We suspect Google has no more idea than we have. But Father Pitt notes that, out of literally hundreds of pictures he took on a day out on the town, the one Google selected was this one. It depicts the floor, wall, baseboard heating, and part of a seat of a 4200-series streetcar on the Red Line, with Father Pitt’s own bedraggled old Florsheim prominently featured in just the right spot to make a pleasing composition according to the Rule of Thirds. (He would normally have been wearing breeches tied below the knee and a pair of well-fitted hose, but the Port Authority was celebrating Modern Dress Day.) So clearly some intelligence has gone into picking, out of hundreds of pictures, the only one where the shutter accidentally fired while the photographer was adjusting the camera.