Hardly Magniloquent » Meanderings

April Foolery From Google – 2012

Aadil — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 22:15:26 +0000

It’s that time of year, April Fool’s Day. As of 5 minutes ago.¹

The internet has definitely embraced all that is AFD, but no company has done it quite so well, and quite so regular as our favourite future SkyNetters, Google. This year its pretty simple, but so wonderfully glorious: 8-bit NES reference always wins on the tubes.

I won’t bother you with anymore text, you just need to know two things.

1) The intro video hosted at YouTube, of course, is where most of the joke lives.

And 2)

You can actually quest over at Google Maps. Sadly there are only a few places worth questing to, and my house just isn’t one of them, evidence below.

UPDATE:

It has been pointed out to me that I missed out on the crucial change to StreetView®. A crime, to be sure, for which I hopefully can make amends with this cap from my Calgary home.

Probably like ten by the time I finish typing my nonsense. ↩

Stephen Fry on the Wonders of Language

Aadil — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:40:14 +0000

Although Stephen Fry, whom I have an immense man crush it must be said, wrote the text almost two years ago they don’t lose power nor relevance today. Fry expounds the virtue of a maleable approach to language, to tantalize and entice wonderment, by taking the contrapositive stance: pedantry and prescriptivism miss the point, and those who patrol the streets condemning non-standard usages don’t have the time to revel in all that is language.

Matt Rogers has taken this excellent essay and created a kinetic typography video to go along with it. This is one of those videos that should be viewed in fullscreen HD for full immersion.

For the complete text head on over to Stephen Fry’s Blog.

(via Language Log)

CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

Aadil — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:25:44 +0000

It’s that time of year again, and googles April Fool’s Prank is highly entertaining as usual.

Definitely worth checking out is CADIE’s homepage, which she created based on a preliminary scan of the interwebs. It’s a refreshing callback to Geocities/Tripod homepages circa 1997.

Read on for more hooks into CADIE’s integration with other google services

The YouTube profile, not really worth a pass, but what is impressive is how many different services are integrated with CADIE.

The International Googles also got in on the game, though they are standalone efforts without our new friend CADIE.

And lastly, Google code has some interesting examples on its front page showing off the lovely language lolcode.

Crack this code: OMGWTFBBQ!!!11!!11one one

Aadil — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:05:53 +0000

As fear-mongering goes, this month old article over at the Liverpool Echo, is quite wonderful. It has the two main ingredients needed, outrageous conclusions paired with nonsensical factual information.

It appears that the children of Mereyside have started employing a secret codes in their internet chatter in an effort to evade the prying eyes of their care-givers. And this is exactly what the sex offenders expect, because they have the Rosetta stone to this “Internet Code”.

Luckily for us all, former police officer Jo Schumacher has cracked their childish code so that parents can once again protect their kids from the foul intertubes.

(Courtesy: http://osbalaji.blogspot.com/)

Schumacher: “The code was originally used by hackers, who abbreviated words. Now students are using it because they do not want their parents or teachers to know what they are saying.”

She has published the translations in a “Kids Internet Talk Directory”. So now parents can once again monitor all the goings-on of their children.

An example of this secret language: AFK

If only the Pirate Bay Prosecutors had purchased Ms. Schumacher’s book, they may have saved themselves embarrassment.

Probably the best moment of the article, though, is the revelation that the children are already moving to a new, harder to crack code:

Learning Educational Establishment Talk aka LEET

Apparently, in LEET, the letters are swapped with number AND symbols! I must say that I am truly impressed with the resourcefulness of these youngsters for developing such a system.

\/\/h@t 15 73h \/\/0r1D C0/\/\1n6 2!!!1!

School wants youngster to know which races are worth effort

Aadil — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:56:21 +0000

The CBC, is reporting on the complaint by the mother of an adopted Ethiopian child who had to console her child when she came home with this Grade 4 homework assignment:

Roughly, the children are given the situation that the planet is about to explode, and the spaceship can only hold 3 people. However, there are four people present, a francophone, a Chinese person , an African and an Englishman. You have 10 minutes to decide who gets on the rocket ship and who dies.

The title of the assignment is “The respect of ethnic groups: A roleplay game”

In defense of this the principal said “..some of the students would say ‘Well, we’ve chosen to keep the three main ethnical groups in our community, which is English, French and Amerindian, because of being able to communicate.’ “

Wow…just… wow. That is certainly a rational response, but the question is so horrific that suddenly we are defining worth based on race and linguistic character? The problem would have been interesting when I was in grade 4, given that my ethnicity wasn’t even represented.

Thoughts?