Text Technologies » Fun stuff

Google funniest joke of the year (that I’ve noticed so far)

Curt Monash — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:57:45 +0000

I just noticed a subtle and really funny Google joke. Look at where on the search results page it tells you how long the search took. They’re screwing around with the units of time (and in some cases substituting actual measures of speed). So far I’ve noticed figures in units of:

Centibeats
Microfortnights
Microweeks
Nanocenturies
“The velocity of an unladen swallow”
Planck times
Shakes of a lamb’s tail
Warp (Star Trek, of course)
Centons (Battlestar Galactica)
Parsecs (a unit of time in Star Wars Episode IV )
Jiffies
Skidoo (23.00 skidoo, to be precise)
Gigawatts (pretty hard to explain how that’s a unit of time or velocity)
Epochs (one precise figure was 1.25e-15 epochs)
Hertz
Femtogalactic years

I haven’t tried to check or estimate the conversion factors used.

Related links

2010 April Fool’s Day highlights
My recent roundup of past years’ April Fool’s highlights
A companion roundup of other, even funnier pranks
My alternative to pranks: April No-Fooling Day
Google Operating System with more on Google’s 2010 April Fool’s jokes.

April Fool’s Day highlights

Curt Monash — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:48:34 +0000

It’s April 1, and hence time for jests, online or otherwise. Highlights this year include:

In a charming blog post, Google annoucned the new Android Translate For Animals feature.
Reddit has apparently made every user an administrator, throwing the whole site –or at least the Reddit hot stories list — into chaos.
A video depicts icons falling off of an iPhone onto a table.
Firetoys, Ltd., whoever they are, are promoting a Back To The Future style hoverboard. I want one!

Edit: And more being added as I find them:

Supernatural Season 6
A crucial computer gaming accessory

Related links

My recent roundup of past years’ April Fool’s highlights
A companion roundup of other, even funnier pranks
My alternative to pranks: April No-Fooling Day

Google’s version of an old joke

Curt Monash — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:57:30 +0000

Search Google for “recursion” and it helpfully offers a link to let you search on — you guessed it — “recursion.” The joke has been implemented in German as well.

This idea is not, to put it mildly, new. I first saw the definition

Recursion: See recursion

in the glossary to Intellicorp’s KEE documentation, in 1984 or so. And I’d guess the joke is actually a lot older than that.

For another variation of the same idea, see this link.

Edit: For yet more recursive humor, see this picture of Wil Wheaton.

(Humor) You don’t exist if you’re not on Twitter!

Curt Monash — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 07:51:56 +0000

I’d like to recommend two Twitter-related comedy videos:

Twouble with Twitters is a hugely popular, slickly executed cartoon video.
The Twitter Song is a funny song that happens to be better musically than most satirical songs.

But I’m still waiting for a Twitter-related takeoff on “The Trouble With Tribbles” …

Actually, Google’s other April Fool’s joke is indeed funny

Curt Monash — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:57:05 +0000

CADIE is an an AI with a MySpace-like blog suitable for a young girl. (E.g., lots of cuddly panda bears.)

I suspect CADIE is going to grow up a lot over the course of the day …

Google’s April Fool’s joke seems pretty lame

Curt Monash — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:43:48 +0000

3-D browsing. Yawn. Not like this Google April Fool’s classic.

April Fool’s spoof re newspapers, social media

Curt Monash — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:21:12 +0000

The Guardian says all its articles will be published on Twitter, in 140 characters or less. Very well played.

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

When homonyms go astray

Curt Monash — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:05:06 +0000

I can’t tell whether a recent comment to a post of mine is a spoof or not. If it is a spoof, it’s very well done. But if it’s serious, how did that commenter find the thread in the first place??

A startup that could improve all our lives

Curt Monash — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 08:27:41 +0000

Apostrophee aspires to hugely improve the experience of cyberspace, by applying grammar and spelling correction to online content, especially blog comments and forum posts.

Too bad the article is a spoof.

Reflecting on why it has to be spoof could be somewhat enlightening.

Chatbot game — Digg meets Eliza?

Curt Monash — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:41:59 +0000

I forget how I got the URL, but something called the Chatbot Game purports to be a combination of Eliza and Digg. That is, it’s a chatbot with a lot of rules; anybody can submit rules; rules are voted up and down.

I don’t think I’ll want to play with it for a while (I’m heading off on vacation for a while), so I thought I’d post it here to see if anybody else had any thoughts about or familiarity with it.

Related link

Russian chatbot apparently passes Turing Test