In addition to his other crimes against humanity, Saddam Hussein also pirates movies: “In one cabinet was an assortment of pirated movies, some with the titles in English.”
It’s one thing to piss off the President of the United States, but now Saddam will face the ultimate adversary: Jack Valenti!
Armed with a list of spelling errors and my old friend Google, I decided to see if I could find the most commonly misspelled word on the Web. If you can do better, leave a comment. (The number of results is in parentheses after each word or term.)
– transexual (2860k)
– definately (693k, via Shannon)
– offical (366k)
– managment (359k)
– goverment (317k)
– commerical (277k)
– Febuary (245k)
– enviroment (242k)
– occurence (186k)
– commision (167k)
– assocation (134k)
– Cincinatti (70k)
– milennium (32k)
Special mention: “could of” (166k results), “would of” (296k), “should of” (123k)
Can anybody find a misspelled word that’s more popular than its correct spelling? Update: We have a winner! Ewin found that “transexual” (2860k) is the more common (but incorrect) spelling of “transsexual” (1660k)!
A Usenet group devoted to swapping karaoke versions of popular songs is unusually popular, with 7500+ songs posted in the last month alone. I don’t know where the original files are coming from, but the diversity and timeliness of available files in alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke is staggering. The standards are all represented (“Celebration,” “I Will Survive,” and “Mandy”), along with brand new songs spanning the genres of alt-rock, country, and pop. The MP3s are bundled into ZIP files along with mysterious .CDG files, so I did a little research.
Apparently, karaoke CDs are distributed in a format called CD+G, which stores images and lyrics information along with the uncompressed audio. Clever karaoke fans developed software to rip and compress these discs into a format they call MP3+G. It looks like the .CDG file is all of the goofy images, lyrics, and metadata that is normally displayed by specialized karaoke players.
Some of the more oddball gems were karaoke versions of King Missile’s “Detachable Penis,” Nirvana’s “You Know You’re Right,” Electric 6’s “High Voltage,” Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run,” PJ Harvey’s “One Line,” and the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk To Fuck.” Is there really much overlap between karaoke and Dead Kennedys fans?
Anyway, enjoy singing along to these karaoke renditions of The Strokes’ “Last Nite,” Andrew WK’s “Party Hard,” and the White Stripes’ “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.”
If you can read this, you’re sitting too close to your monitor. (For those of you arriving late to the party, my homepage was displayed at 50% scale for the whole day.)
In other news on this lovely April 1:
– Matt’s Script Archive merges with CPAN
– Joi Ito met the Pope
– Tori Amos to play Mary Poppins
– Aaron abandons Google for Overture
– From Slashdot: the Evil Bit RFC, Gentoo switches to RPM, whitespace-only programming language, Distrowatch loves Windows XP, anti-cracker application for PC/Mac, Enlightenment goes gold, new Lord of the Rings movie delayed
– From the Mefi thread: The End of Free gets ads, Chris Pirillo gets blurry, Thinkgeek’s new products, DC Comics buys Elfquest, SomethingAwful’s boring fetish
– From the K5 thread: WinXPHints
– Honda’s Mecha car salesman
– Minidisc.com gives up on the format
– Dave Matthews fan site changes to John Mayer fan site (is there a meaningful difference?)
– Inmate wins freedom in new reality show
– Phonescoop covers Nokia’s rotary cell phone and Samsung’s Gollum Phone
– New BBEdit pricing option
– Teevee’s brilliant Reality Network
– Digital Web displayed upside-down and backwards
More April 1 updates throughout the day.
This Japanese website appears to define the geometry of breasts (in eight parts), miniskirts, bathing suits, and women in glasses. I can’t make heads or tails of any of it, and the Babelfish translation doesn’t help at all.
Can someone translate a little and tell us what they’re talking about?
Probably the most obscure and underrated genre of gaming is text-based interactive fiction, made popular with the Zork series in the 1980s. Commercial text adventure games are long gone, but hobbyists like Andrew Plotkin and Adam Cadre continue to push the boundaries of the genre.
I finished Plotkin’s Shade in only 15 minutes, but it continues to resonate like only the best short fiction can. Take a few minutes to play it online right now, and let me know what you think of his strange and beautiful world.
A couple hints are below, for those unfamiliar with Interactive Fiction.
Another stupid Internet Explorer trick… This webpage actually opens your CD-ROM drive without prompting, using VBScript to access the Windows Media Player API. If you hate Internet Explorer, feel free to include the below sample code on every page of your own site.
July 29, 2003: The Windows Media Player API won’t let you close the CD-ROM drive once it’s open. Sorry.
Recently, I noticed that several webloggers that discussed the suspected chemical weapons plant found in southern Iraq on March 24 weren’t mentioning those claims turned out to be false, even after the story was retracted revised on USA Today, New York Times, the Washington Post, and Yahoo’s front page yesterday.
I thought this particular example would be an interesting case study to study how bias affects story selection on weblogs. So I searched Technorati for weblogs that linked to the four most popular URLs (1, 2, 3, 4) about the chemical plant. Starting with a list of 148 weblogs spanning the socio-political spectrum, I located the relevant entry on each site and searched for followups or updates.
In brief, here are my findings. 112 weblogs linked to the original story, but didn’t follow up with another entry or correct their existing entry in any way. 28 weblogs linked to the original story, and later posted a correction or other addendum. 8 weblogs only linked to the story after it proved to be false, but didn’t link to it when the news originally broke. The complete list of categorized links is below. (If you have any corrections, please e-mail or leave a comment.)
If you look at the sites, it appears that conservative weblogs tended to only link the original report, liberal weblogs tended to only link to the correction, and mixed and group weblogs linked to both.
I’m not going to jump to conclusions with these results; they don’t necessarily imply bias from their authors. The followup article could be considered less newsworthy as the breaking news, for example, or it might be more a reflection of a reluctance to rehash a story that a weblogger has already covered. I would love to hear from any of the webloggers, explaining why they did or didn’t follow up with an update to the story. Any theories or interpretations of the data are also welcome.
And if you can think of a polarizing breaking news story that many left-wing, anti-war webloggers jumped on but later neglected to retract, e-mail me.
Continue reading “Bias Affects Story Updates on Political Weblogs”
If you’re using Internet Explorer for Windows, try loading this image and typing Ctrl-A to highlight it. Is it magic? Or EEE-VIL?! (An explanation of the trick follows.)
I just received an e-mail with the subject line “Shock and Awe.” Turns out, it’s unsolicited spam advertising a gross-out porn site called freakview.com. Spammers seem to be adjusting to wartime nicely.
