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:
- 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.
| Categories: Fun stuff, Google, Humor | Leave a Comment |
April Fool’s Day highlights
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:
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
| Categories: Fun stuff, Google, Humor, Social software and online media | 3 Comments |
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.
| Categories: Fun stuff, Google, Humor, Search engines | Leave a Comment |
(Humor) You don’t exist if you’re not on Twitter!
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” …
| Categories: Fun stuff, Humor, Microblogging, Social software and online media, Twitter | Leave a Comment |
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 …
Google’s April Fool’s joke seems pretty lame
3-D browsing. Yawn. Not like this Google April Fool’s classic.
| Categories: Google, Humor | 2 Comments |
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?”
| Categories: Fun stuff, Humor, Microblogging, Online media, Social software and online media | 2 Comments |
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??
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. 😉
| Categories: Blogosphere, Fun stuff, Humor, Social software and online media | 1 Comment |
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.
Related link