indessed roscivs

One of the coolest Google features (from a corpus linguistics point of view) is the ability to do wildcard searches in the middle of phrases.

For example, if you search for “what has * here”, Google will find all pages that have that phrase with something substituted for the asterisk. This lets you see first of all what word is most common in such a phrase (in this case, “happened”). Or you might be looking for different variations of the phrase (such as “transpired”, which shows up on the first page).

In my most recent case, I heard the phrase “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” a cautionary tale against reading too much into things, and I was interested in the origins of the phrase. Why is the word “cigar” used, as opposed to any other number of ordinary objects? It turns out that the phrase is a very popular one for substitutions: a search for “sometimes a * is just a *” reveals eight different alternatives to “cigar”, such as “snake”, “squirrel”, and “fool”—just on the front page. Paging through the results, there’s no end to variations on the phrase.

The origin of the phrase, and the reason for the word choice, appears to trace back to Sigmund Freud. Freud, of course, is infamous for his sexual imagery, constructing elaborate meanings for everyday items or occurrences, framing them in terms of repressed sexuality. He also commonly smoked cigars. One day, according to legend, a cheeky student asked him what his obsession with cigars signified. Freud allegedly responded, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

I have no way of knowing whether this story is accurate, but of all the times Freud seemed to read too much into something seemingly innocuous, this was one time I wonder if he didn’t read quite enough into it. Perhaps he was protesting too much his innocence?

A few months ago I talked about Steve Jobs’ offer to remove DRM from music sold on the iTunes Music Store. As I noted then,

Many, including those at the aforementioned conference, have accused Steve Jobs of being “insincere,” calling his open letter a “red herring.” They believe that Jobs knows that the music companies will never allow him to sell music without DRM protection, and is simply bluffing to get the EU off his back. Steve would never sell music without DRM, they maintain. This is just a PR move—Apple needs DRM to keep people on iTunes and the iPod.

Turns out Jobs was being honest the whole time—last month, Apple announced that EMI, one of the big five media conglomerates, was going to begin selling DRM-free music on Apple’s store. (As an interesting aside, when this news hit, nearly everyone thought it was a great advance that would help both Apple and EMI—reporters were apparently having a difficult time finding people who didn’t think so.)

Now, Apple has reportedly extended this deal to anyone (including independent labels) who sells music on their web site. I’m hoping this results in great competition, where labels who embrace DRM-free music sell more than those who are reluctant to do so, eventually resulting in the death of all DRM-encumbered music.

Steve Jobs was right when he said the best solution was to abolish DRM entirely. And, due in a large way to his efforts in this arena, today we’re a little bit closer to that world.

The other day, I posted an article about a Japanese Poodle Scam, in which poor unsuspecting Japanese people were duped into thinking their shaved sheep were actually poodles. This story was reported by a number of reliable US sources such as Fox News … but it turns out that the scam might be a scam itself?

Turns out the story of the poodle/sheep mixup is a popular Urban Legend in Japan that makes its rounds every so often. The Japanese moviestar in question had simply repeated it on a news show as something she had heard about a friend, not a personal experience. Somehow the rest of the story got invented out of thin air and copied from paper to paper.

Reminds me of the time Fox News picked up a story from the “humor” section of another news outlet about how Muslim students were outraged at the presence of a ham sandwich and compared it to starving Somalians. They repeatedly stated (as you can see for yourself in the linked video) “We’re not making this up!” … which I suppose technically was true…

I’ll give you guys a break from the Fifteen Game clues and instead just give you a link to xkcd, one of my favorite web comics:
http://xkcd.com/c250.html

Remember to always check before forwarding on that email!

I recently discovered that the authors of the book Freakonomics have a blog where they discuss all manner of things tangentially related to economics. (Well, I say “discovered,” but I should really say “re-discovered” since the book, which I got for Christmas, specifically talks about their blog and probably gives the address somewhere, but web addresses in print rarely make it to my keyboard. The “re-discovery” happened when I found the blog via another blog via the Internet.)

They discuss such interesting tidbits as a recent three-way tie on Jeopardy, or the woman who murdered her husband after searching Google for things such as “how to commit murder,” “undetectable poisons,” and “fatal digoxin doses.” (Note that the cops didn’t subpoena Google for her search history and somehow trace it back to her or anything complicated like that—they simply searched her computer and found the queries in her browser’s history. Moral of the story: if you’re going to commit murder, don’t use Google to help you. Or at least flush your cache.)

Unrelated note: Vancouver just won! Their division lead is, for now at least, safe.

The Economist has a suprisingly good article on Wikipedia, the “infinitely elastic internet encyclopedia”.

Wikipedia has its strong points and its weak points, and the article manages to touch on all of them successfully, without devolving into a laundry-list of the usual unfounded accusations, or listing off all the misguided ways that Wikipedia could easily solve all its problems.

To me, the strongest point of Wikipedia is that you have not only the most recent article to look at, but the complete history of every modification to the page—from vandalism to spelling fixes to complete rewrites. Not only that, but you also have the complete history of every change to the discussion page for every article. You can see what parts of the article are controversial, why they’re controversial, and the reasons people have given in defense and in criticism of the various pieces. That’s an amazing wealth of information.

The weakest point of Wikipedia isn’t about vandalism (both the blatant kind and the subtle kind get reverted very quickly) or bias (even very controversial pages don’t have a very strong bias, and you can always read the talk page anyway). The weakest point is that articles that “northern white computer-literate males” don’t care about tend to be neglected in favor of subjects they do care about.

Fortunately, I think even the neglected articles tend to get better over time. It’s easy for someone to add bits to them, and that information is never lost (even if it gets reverted or changed). Over a long period of time, a substantive article forms, even on obscure, non-mainstream topics. It’s self-correcting in a way—if nobody is interested in a certain type of article, it doesn’t get created—but that’s okay because nobody is interested. If suddenly people are interested in that type of article, they will tend to create new content when they find it’s missing.