I Believe Two Things

Google’s “auto complete” recommendations are getting increasingly absurd, even if they do conform perfectly to real people’s searches.

Today, when I wanted to find a good place to sell my 12-channel audio mixer, I started my search with the word “sell” and Google jumped in with a few ideas for what I might need.

Things People Sell Online

Naturally, “sell textbooks online” and “selling on eBay” are popular search choices.  “Sell gold” has also gained popularity recently, to the point that airports and train stations in Germany have vending machines selling gold wafers.

“Sell WoW account” is a bit surprising (perhaps World of Warcraft is losing popularity as people can no longer afford the monthly fee), but it’s “selling virginity” that’s most striking.

Some careful, “strictly business” research suggests much of this searching is related to Natalie Dylan (a pseudonym), a Sacramento State graduate student who last year auctioned her virginity, having allegedly gotten bids up to $3.8 million.  Fox News is, of course, outraged.

Local CBS affiliate KOVR-TV quoted Dennis Hof, owner of the Bunny Ranch where the auction will be held, as saying:

Natalie is a very smart girl. All she wants to do is get her master’s degree in family and marriage counseling and be a psychologist.  She’s selling her virginity to accomplish that.

Adding a punchline at this point would only spoil the pure beauty of that statement.

Clients occasionally need to send me screen captures of their browser windows.  Sometimes this is for debugging (e.g., so they can show me something that’s broken).  Other times, like today, it’s to show me an administrative application that I can’t access myself.

I spent some time today looking through details in some captured pages before the Google Toolbar atop the page caught my eye:

What's really on your mind?

Anyone else find that recent Google query particularly interesting?

This was the fortune in my Chinese food this afternoon:

Enjoyed the meal?
Buy one to go too.

“Marketing Cookies.”  Coming soon to a restaurant near you.

Foodler lets lazy people (like me) order food online from area restaurants and have it delivered.

When browsing menus, the site highlights certain food terms and offers definitions.  For example, if you don’t know what “chipotle” is, just click it to see the definition:

A brownish-red hot spice consisting of ground, ripe, and dried jalapenos that has a distinctive hot, smoky, biting, sweet, and meaty flavor.

When planning an order from Moogy’s recently, I noticed the word “broccoli” highlighted, and couldn’t resist clicking.  Broccoli is:

Tiny bunches of tightly closed green buds growing from a thick edible stalk.

Let’s pause for a moment to consider our achievements as a society.  As an average Foodler user, I’m already expected to lounge on my couch as I order food and have it delievered, without exerting more effort than I would in writing this sentence.  Now, in addition, I’m expected to be unfamiliar with what broccoli is.

And if you turn your attention to the left, you’ll see the Morlock race evolving beneath our feet.

I went shopping for some color coding labels from Staples this morning, and I particularly enjoy the picture of what a yellow dot looks like.  You can also zoom in if you find that picture of a yellow dot insufficiently detailed.

I’ve written before about Office Depot’s picture of a white poster board (which looks suspiciously similar to the rest of the white website), but now I feel like the giant yellow circle is even more awesome.

What ever happened to that “caller ID” craze that took the nation by storm back in the 1990s?  It was this fascinating technology that would show the name of the person calling whenever the phone rang.

Sure, telemarketers abused the system, either sending false information or simply hiding their number as “Out of Area” or “Unknown Name,” but for legitimate calls — the ones we wanted to answer anyway — it worked great!

Of course, when someone in my “Contacts” list calls my cell phone, I can see the person’s name and even their picture now, but what about people who haven’t called before?  I just get their number!

Now I have to turn to Google whenever my phone rings to figure out who’s calling.  Searching for a number works well when it’s a legitimate business calling, or an illegal telemarketer, but it fails entirely for personal calls.

So I ask again: what happened to that “caller ID” craze of the 1990s?  Have we just forgotten how it’s supposed to work?

Back in 2006, Netflix offered to pay $1,000,000 to anyone who can improve its movie recommendations by 10%.  A reliable supply of recommendations will keep a customer who’s otherwise run out of movies to watch from canceling his account.

For comparison, let’s analyze the technique Netflix is currently using to pick movies for me.  I’ve rated some genres in the past (comedy: 5 stars, horror: no stars), and this afternoon it crunched some numbers and recommended this new genre:

Romantic British Dramas
Your taste preferences created this row.

• British
• Dramas
• Romantic

Just imagine what a 10% improvement will do!

Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport offers free wireless Internet access in addition to having abundant power outlets scattered throughout the waiting areas (at least in Terminal 2).  As with most such networks, users must accept the terms of service before gaining access to the Internet, via a page that looks like this:

Phoenix Sky Harbor Internet

Anybody else pause at that first question?  It reads:

How Friendly is Phoenix Sky Harbor today?

The possible responses are:

America’s Friendliest
Very Friendly
Friendly
Not Friendly

For the record, it was very friendly.  I can’t in good conscious declare it “America’s Friendliest” having not yet visited many of our nation’s major airports.

I’m shopping for new eyeglasses (or perhaps just new lenses), and Cambridge EyeDoctors got my attention with the advertisement “$89 complete eyeglass package.” I naturally went straight to their website to look for locations.  There, I found the single best line ever written in the entire history of marketing.

Depending on your lifestyle, personal preference, and vision needs, you may want or need an additional pair of glasses. One pair should be used to provide vision correction while performing your primary activities. A second pair can be used to compliment or provide vision correction for other activities in which you participate.

Depending on your humor preferences, you may want to read a punchline after that quote.  The punchline could be constructed by assembling words in an order you’d find favorable.

Wow!  I found an instance where Feynman turned out to be wrong about something!

The Textbook League (no, I did not just make that name up) republished the part of Feynman’s book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman describing his participation in the State [California] Curriculum Commission’s efforts to choose new textbooks.

The commission did some phenomenally idiotic things, up to and including rating one textbook that was “printed” with entirely blank pages.  (They rated it favorably.)  Of course, you already knew that, since you have already read Feynman’s books.

As I reread it online, this excerpt in particular stood out:

They would talk about different bases of numbers — five, six, and so on — to show the possibilities. That would be interesting for a kid who could understand base ten — something to entertain his mind. But what they turned it into, in these books, was that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would come: “Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base five.” Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing. If you can do it, maybe it’s entertaining; if you can’t do it, forget it. There’s no point to it.

When this happened in 1964, there was probably no point at all.  Today, however, every software developer has had (at least once) to convert base 10 into base 16 or base 2.  Those like me found the exercise frustrating at first.  If only there’d been some sort of practice for this in the mathematics textbooks of my childhood!

(I’m mostly joking — surely! — but I do find interesting how that analysis might be completely different today.)