April 1, 2010

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

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:

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

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April 1, 2010

April Fool’s Day highlights

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

Edit: And more being added as I find them:

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March 29, 2010

Google’s version of an old joke

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.

April 5, 2009

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

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

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

April 1, 2009

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

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 …

April 1, 2009

Google’s April Fool’s joke seems pretty lame

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

April 1, 2009

April Fool’s spoof re newspapers, social media

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?”

August 26, 2008

When homonyms go astray

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??

August 17, 2008

A startup that could improve all our lives

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. 😉

July 10, 2008

Chatbot game — Digg meets Eliza?

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.

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