Google suggests lulz

Some of these are really great. Also, it's a very easy meme to contribute to. See something funny when typing in searches? Screenshot! Honestly sometimes I'll intentionally type in the name of something to see what people are thinking about it. It's a pretty interesting tool in that way alone, really.

Unfortunately not an awesome Google Easter egg.

That's after typing only "i l"!
#2 ranking too!

Still don't know the explanation for this one.

Sort of reminiscent of recursion?


Even more after the jump!

Dear Yellow Pages

We just got ours recently. Several huge books dropped off in front of a place exclusively inhabited by 20-somethings (maybe even an early-30-something), never to be touched again.

FYI, here's some ways to stop them delivering to your house.

(via fuckyeahdementia)

Wikileaker update - Hear Adrian Lamo talk about his decision to drop the dime

I've found two interviews with Adrian Lamo on his role in the arrest of Bradley Manning over the Collateral Murder video.

For me the biggest mystery in this whole thing is what motivated Adrian Lamo, the hacker, to turn someone in to the authorities. Lamo has spent so long on the other side of the coin and had his own troubles with the feds. Why did he decide to go out of his way to help them now?

People are putting forward a lot of different theories, and eventually you want to hear how Lamo himself would explain it. Well, here's a June 10th interview from an Australian podcast called Risky Business (it starts around 17:30). Then there's another at Salon.com where he's pressed a bit harder for his rationale, though the interviewer starts to sound (almost) as obtuse and closed-minded as a cable news talking-head. You can find it waaay at the bottom of this article, conducted by columnist Glenn Greenwald for background but also recorded and posted online.

"can i forward a google voice number to another google voice number"

In trying to find the answer to the above question, I noticed 2 things. First, Google Suggest came up with that exact phrase as I typed my search terms, and second, there was no good answer when you searched it. I'm going to go ahead and assume others are looking for the same answer and also couldn't find it. So then I had to go with the empirical method and just try it myself.

And no. It won't let you.

Hopefully now people can find the answer ahead of time.

P.S. I then tried forwarding to the same number the other Google Voice number forwards to, and that doesn't work either. It'll let you go ahead and add the number, but then it kicks that number off your other account. Adding insult to injury, to get it back on your other account you have to re-claim it and set up voicemail forwarding all over again.

Weird intrigue between Wired, Wikileaks, two ex-hackers, and the leaker of Collateral Murder

(This post presented in Bold Name-O-Vision to keep track of the Major Characters)

As someone who checks Wired News regularly and will click on any article about WikiLeaks [Wikipedia article here], in the last few weeks I've been treated to a fascinating drama that's developed because of the arrest of Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning as the alleged source of the Collateral Murder video. This is the footage that came out this spring showing American Apache pilots in 2007 eagerly massacring a group of Iraqis including civilians and children.

The brief background is that Adrian Lamo, a famous ex-hacker, discovered during online chats with Manning that he leaked the classified footage to WikiLeaks. Lamo told the authorities and Manning was arrested. Now here's where it starts to get strange. Wired broke the news because Kevin Poulsen, another famous ex-hacker, is friends with Lamo and also now a writer for Wired. In fact he's been reporting on this story continually in Wired's Threat Level blog. Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, is unsurprisingly unhappy about Lamo's outing of their source but is apparently angry at Poulsen too. He (or whoever tweets for WikiLeaks) has been leveling a twitter war against both of them, assuming they're in cahoots. Assange, who has assumed Manning's legal defense, even sent an email to Lamo requesting his chat logs and giving him some pretty derogatory "advice". And we know about the email because of Poulsen, who got it from Lamo and published it on Wired. Confused yet?

Something that makes this so weird is that each side in this seems complicit in at least some dirtiness. For instance I usually like WikiLeaks but Assange's email and tweets are such unmeasured, defamatory attacks that they betray a defensiveness that overrides his ideals. Then Lamo, of course, looks the villain by gaining the trust of, then outing a whistle-blower simply following his conscience. And Lamo's relationship with Poulsen hangs a doubt over the image of Poulsen simply reporting the events in objective journalistic fashion. The greatest example is Poulsen's acquisition of, then public posting of the email from Assange to Lamo. Even the organizations themselves seem a bit questionable in this whole exchange. It's not what I'm used to, having Wired take part in the drama instead of telling the story from a distance. As for WikiLeaks, I've already talked about their tweets.

In fact, the only one who seems to come out clean in this is Manning, who actually appears to have the purest intentions. Not all the facts are out yet but people are already mentioning him in the same breath as Daniel Ellsberg, a leaker from a previous disastrous war.

(credit: helpful background from this post on "TechEYE")

You're now watching in THX Surround Sound

(I think it's called "Dramatic Lemur")

Count to 1,023 on your fingers (spoiler: it's finger binary!)

I just had the epiphany that normal finger-counting is in unary. It's like binary, but lower! For some reason, even though "binary" indicates "2" I never realized there could be a counting system below that. It's not complicated though. Unary is just what you use when you count with tally marks ( or ).

So I realized instead you can use binary! Cause your fingers can represent 0 or 1, right? And that should totally let you higher than 10. Who hasn't run out of fingers sometimes? And then I tried to figure out how high that lets you count. Since you have 10 fingers and each is a binary digit you can go to 2¹⁰-1, which equals... 1,023. Whoa.

Then I tried it out to make sure and see how easy it is to do. It gets a little weird. Here's an idea:


So there you go! Perhaps with some practice counting this way will be natural enough to be actually useful!

And in the interests of internet ethics, I will credit my source for this idea. A really esoteric source: this comment on a Boing Boing post where a guy mentioned, in passing, counting on his fingers in unary vs. binary.

(For further reading, I'll let you know there's (of course) a Wikipedia article.)

Made of Awesome

Best response to anything ever.

Oh, and click the Read more » for obligatory derivatives. Even stupider, and even funner.

Google SSL

Heard of Google SSL? Now Google lets you use SSL encryption on its general search page, meaning you visit "https://www.google.com" instead of "http://www.google.com". This way the things you search for are encrypted at your computer & decrypted at Google so no one in-between (i.e. your ISP, whoever's running that public WiFi) can snoop. But it's only for the general search right now, so beware: if you click on "image results" for your search term it's not encrypted anymore. You can read a more able write-up at Lifehacker.

The "real" point of this post is that I made Google SSL my default search to try it out and thus wanted to make a favicon to distinguish it in my browser. And I've come to like the one I whipped up: . Yes, it uses the old Google favicon () because dammit it's so much classier than the new one (). Also, that's the silhouette of a lock on top of it. Ok, my icon isn't that fantastic but I've found that the lock is large enough to be a recognizable shape suggesting security while leaving enough of the G uncovered to be clear it's Google.

Just trying to share something I've found useful, in keeping with the spirit of these great Internets.

Hmm, of course it seems to have a little bit of this flavor too:

The internet is actually kinda international now

From what I remember circa 2000, the idea that it's really a "World Wide" Web was more theoretical than actual. Seemed to be just us Americans on there. But lately I've gotten the sense that this time around, we've actually got everyone joining the party. Ok, so obviously it's not everyone yet but all across different forums and media-sharing sites it seems easy to find someone logging on from another country.

And it's not just a vague feeling - I've got data* now!

The exclamation points are because I just realized that over the last several months I'd inadvertently collected a bunch of info on where sampled internet users are from. I did it through yourworldoftext.com, which I wrote about way back at the beginning of this blog (see full explanation there). To summarize it, imagine an online, infinite wall of graffiti, ASCII style. And where do the users come from? The main way (I think) that people end up at my sub-page is through Google's Chrome Experiments, though feel free to peruse Google's list of links to it.

Here's what I'm getting at: on this page I came across a DIY guest book of sorts, meaning someone had written "WHERE ARE YOU FROM?" and people started writing their locations and current dates. The reason I say "I collected" the info is that without my effort this list would have been quickly written over or deleted. This version of graffiti is in pencil, and the commenters are a little eraser-happy. So I used my admin-powers to protect the list. And because I can't pre-protect text so I have to come back periodically and do a quick preservation on the recent entries. Over the last several months I made this an almost-daily routine of mine.

And so today I was noticing how a good proportion of the entries are from interesting places. I'll show everything I've collected up to this point to give an impression of how many entries I've gotten. If you're not up for perusing, I'll mention some highlights: Maharashtra, India; Szeged, Hungary; Turku, Finland; Rydzyna, Poland; Wollongong, Australia; and (drum roll..) Thimpu, Bhutan!

(but yes, plenty are jokes, which is to be expected on yourworldoftext.com)




*I'll be clear: my scientific training balks at any implication that this is properly collected data, with the biases and self-selecting issues inherent to internet surveying.