Radio is now playing Dvořák's String Serenade. Oooh, I love that, especially the opening movement.
Well, I finally got the letter from Newsweek I'd been waiting for.
Newsweek is one of those subscription services that send you a bill to renew nearly as soon as you've signed up, and keep on doing it on a regular basis. On Monday or Tuesday you get your magazine, full of informative and thoughtful articles painted on high-quality glossy paper, complete with enticing advertising, much of it tailored to your locality (and possibly your demographic as well -- most of the models in the ads in the edition I receive are white, though this could be a coincidence). And on alternate Thursdays you get your "other" mailing from Newsweek. Early in your subscription year these usually take the form of surveys that attempt to condition you into thinking you're part of some sort of community, and that your thoughts actually affect what goes into their product. But as the year wears on, the letters turn into "time to renew" thingies. "But I JUST RENEWED!" you protest upon receiving one of these. Yet they keep on sending them, and you keep on protesting, until you realize two things: 1) your protests have solely taken the form of yelling "I JUST RENEWED" at the envelope you received in the mail, and this does not accomplish the task of actually communicating with the creators of your beloved, ever-shiny news publication; and 2) several months have passed, and the truth of the statement "I JUST RENEWED" is now called into question. You know how people accuse other people of believing that if they just keep repeating a certain false statement, their statements will eventually become true? Well, this actually does happen.
"It's time to renew! :-)"
"No, it isn't."
"It's time to renew! :-)"
"No, it isn't."
"It's time to renew! :-)"
"No, it isn't."
"It's time to renew! :-)"
"No, it.... oh, crap."
So, anyway, the letter I referred to in the first line of this post had this on the envelope: "Your LAST ISSUE is in the mail!" Even though I seem to be spending less and less time reading it, I decided to go ahead and renew. It was time.
I found this and this to be quite clever. Enjoy. To waste even more time, check the rest out (some of the others are lame, still others I haven't seen at all) at http://www.weirdcrap.com/chick/.
Ouch! Check out this ad for Vonage I just saw in the WP. Poor Paris. OK, you can't really have too much pity for her, but it's still pretty harsh.
Don't forget to check out KOP every now and then, especially his Predictions
article. This time, it's OK to read the comments in the article I linked to.
Here are the kind of things I think about at work instead of trying to figure out how our app intersperses calls to lex/yacc with other stuff. Recall that a few days ago, I, er, suggested supplying a certain well-known geek phrase to Google Suggest. Just to smugly remind myself of the sort of result that produces, I ran it again, and noticed something odd about the number of results Google found for each suggested query. I took a screenshot of my partially typed query, which I invite you to inspect. Why do certain queries return more results than certain other queries?
"all your base are belong to us" shows 700,000 results. "all your base belong to us", sans "are", returns twice as many results. Now it is true that the sort of people who make websites using that catch phrase are not, on the whole, known for their careful attention to accuracy (it is fairly common to see the words "up" and "us" reversed in the most ghastly way in the phrase "Somebody set up us the bomb", for example), the word "are" there is indisputably the linchpin that identifies this sentence as Japlish, and its omission by someone who wanted to use the AYB phrase -- without correcting it completely for humorous purposes, which is not done here, either -- seems implausible. I simply can't believe that more people are searching twice as much for the diluted form of the phrase.
"But," you explain, "they are assuming quotes were not used. These results are for documents that contain those words anywhere, not necessarily all together in that order. Therefore the search whose terms are a strict subset of those in another search will return more results than the latter search, because it will get all the results the wordier search got, plus others that don't contain words that were only required in the other search."
But, no. The discriminating word in this case would be "are", but it is not, in fact, a discriminating word as far as Google is concerned. Type the AYBABTU phrase in without quotes, and you get results, but with a caveat near the top: "The following words are very common and were not included in your search: are to." So the AYBABTU and the AYBBTU phrases should return the same number of results. And, in fact, I've just run both these searches, and I get the exact same (estimated) number of results. So I have no idea where Google is coming up with the numbers shown in the graphic.
While you're looking at the graphic, also note that I tried to see if it would offer any different suggestions if I put quotes in it. As you can see from the pic (or by trying yourself), it doesn't.