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Geek Measurements

Casey — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:15:22 +0000

O’ Google how hard do you rock? Very hard indeed.

Maybe this is common knowledge but I just stumbled across this on Google Maps today. I knew about Google Maps of course, but I didn’t know about the measuring tool. To get to it, open Google Maps, then click on My Maps which will open a little sidebar on the left. Next click Distance Measurement Tool and follow the instructions to trace a path on the map and measure it in miles or kilometers. I made a line between my hometown of Detroit and Nashville and it tells the distance between them is 473.044 miles or 761.291 kilometers. Pretty cool, right? But wait, there’s more. Muwahaha.

Next to the Metric / English buttons, I noticed another link called “I’m feeling geeky” and seeing as I was feeling geeky I clicked it. Now I’m offered a whole smorgasbord of units to measure in. How did I go this long without knowing that it’s 15,225.8 Olympic swimming pools in length between here and Detroit? Or 3784.35 furlongs, 6937.98 football fields, 0.0000000000804685 light years, 447,292 smoots, or 1,534,470 cubits of Lagash! That’s Babylonian cubits. Not to be confused with Arabic nil-cubits, Egyptian royal cubits, Greek Kyrenaika cubits, Hashimi cubits, or a bunch of other cubit variations. There’s a whole bunch of other units to select from including cana, Gunter links, potrzebies, Ramsden’s chains, Russian verst, and so many more. Anyway, check it out. In the meantime I’ve got a 204,242,000,000,000 angstrom commute home tonight.

Why do people…

Casey — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:42:04 +0000

I was skimming the reddit front page as usual this morning and came across a funny (or racist depending on your point view) post: Why do black. Someone followed this up later on with Why do white…. Both posts illustrate suggested search queries that you see when you begin entering a search into Google. Google looks at what you’ve typed so far and based on the popularity of queries it has seen in the past, presents you with what it thinks you’re searching for. The results are an unvarnished look at what people are really thinking about. In this case, both illustrate stereotypes but the Why do white post shows how well they work in both directions. “why do black” yields “why do black men like white women” on one page, and at the same time the search for “why do white” presents “why do white men like black women”.

Anyway, I started entering all kinds of phrases beginning with “Why do” into Google: “Why do men”, “Why do women”, “Why do dogs”, “Why do cats”, etc., and snickering at some of the results. And then I typed “Why do people” and my thoughts changed. There were some funny ones (why do people fart), but I thought, remove the element of race and these questions are universal, deeper (why do people lie). I made my own reddit post but either people didn’t get it or it was already soooo five minutes ago.

But my curiosity was piqued. What are people wondering about? I needed more than just the first 10 results Google comes up with. So I did what any alleged geek would do: I wrote an application. Just a quick thing to grab the results from several queries that begin “why do people” and turn those results into a sort of tag cloud so I could see what answers were being looked for more than others. The results included lots of funny / silly stuff: Why do people eat boogers? Why do people use facebook? Why do people wear underwear? But so many of the questions were so serious. So earnest. Why do people fall out of love? Why do people get depressed? Why do people judge? Why do people not like me? And it just struck me as profoundly sad, imagining millions of people around the world so desperate to find answers to questions that have been asked since we’ve been able to communicate. Asking for help from a soulless machine.

The list is below, in alphabetical order, with more popular questions in bigger text than less popular questions. It’s interesting to look through, or at least it is to me and all the questions are linked to Google’s results. Who knows maybe the answers are there. Or at least a little guidance.

Proxi can do that too!

Casey — Tue, 01 May 2007 22:07:37 +0000

I originally posted this on the Proxi Blog

I ran across a post on Daring Fireball today which described using a perl script along with ThisService to search Google for selected text and replace that text with a link to first result returned by Google. Very handy, but I wanted to achieve the same functionality using Proxi.

Proxi supports shell script execution, but only as extra values (for now) so that makes it a little trickier. If you don’t care how much trickier, you can skip the rest of this and simply grab the blueprint.

We have to first break down the blueprint into several stages:

Put the selected text on the clipboard.
Construct a script using the text we’ve selected. Display the query.
Execute the script, place the results in the clipboard, paste and display the results.

More specifically:

Stage 0 – A Control-Shift-L Hotkey Monitor trigger starts the ball rolling. It executes two tasks, a Command-C Key Press to initiate a copy, then an AppleScript which waits a short while to allow the clipboard to export after which it asks Proxi to handle an AppleScript trigger named “query stage 1″.

Stage 1 – Is an AppleScript trigger continues the process. This trigger will fire when Proxi is triggered via AppleScript with the correct name. In this case the name it’s looking for is “query stage 1″. The trigger places the contents of the clipboard into a value named “Clipboard” and executes a Screen Message task to display the search term. Next it write our a perl script using the clipboard contents and the Write to File task. Finally, it kicks off the last stage with another AppleScript task named “query stage 2″.

Stage 2 – An AppleScript trigger which matches “query stage 2″. When fired, it executes the perl script we made in Stage 1 and places the results in an extra value named “ScriptResults”. ScriptResults is displayed in a Screen Message task and loaded onto the clipboard using a Load Clipboard task. Finally, Command-V (paste) is simulated to insert the results in place of the selected text.

This is a great little exercise to demonstrate how to construct complex triggers using Proxi. It also demonstrates some of the shortcomings of Proxi that I’d like to address in future revisions. The ability to execute a script as a task and also modify values during task execution would eliminate the need to break this down into three separate triggers. In the meantime, I hope this helped.

The Proxi wiki has a download link as well as additional information on the Insert Link Blueprint.

Searching for Jesus

Casey — Thu, 18 May 2006 00:09:40 +0000

Remember when John Lennon said The Beatles were more popular than Jesus? Neither do I. I wasn’t alive then, but I know of this imfamous quote. Well now we have a tool from Google that will allow use to answer this question.

Perhaps in 1966 the Beatles were more popular, but 30 (d’oh) 40 years later, Jesus wins hands down. Maybe if we look at some more contemporary artists. Like Coldplay?

Looks like the release of X&Y pushed them ahead briefly, but pretty solidly Jesus otherwise. Perhaps another demographic in music.

Britney Spears was giving The Lord a run for the money until mid 2005 or so. Ah, but Lennon said he would have gotten away with if he’d said television was more popular than Jesus. I wonder what that looks like

Though I wouldn’t call it a blow out, television is winning this particular contest. Especially if American Idol is on.

So there may be some things that are more popular than Jesus, but not by much, right?

Oh… yeah… well there is that.

Stupid Google Tricks

Casey — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 00:34:41 +0000

Wooooolf!

This post from the Red Shed aka Jonathan Rentzsch aka Wolf proved an inescapable 15 minute diversion.

The idea is to Google your first name, prepending unfortunately.

Unfortunately Casey chose the wrong goals in Southern American countries. no one was supposed to find out about that
Unfortunately, Casey’s chief has thousands of young people left at his disposal;
to use as cannon fodder for his bait-and-switch, corporate profiteering. don’t mess with my chief.
Unfortunately, Casey strikes out and all his friends and fans leave him. Wait ’til the chief hears about this… chief?.
Burden Brothers have not been posting mean shit about Casey, unfortunately Casey
has. Those Burden Brothers had it coming.
Unfortunately, Casey has himself been demagoging against Social Security
reform. fat chance.
Unfortunately, Casey’s vaccinations were not up to date and dogs in our shelters
are not vaccinated until they leave the shelter. But my nose is wet. See?.
Unfortunately, Casey has only begun to turn on his political machine. This machine employs some of the most negative campaign tactics imaginable. Muwhahahaha!!
Unfortunately, Casey is anything but cool. sniff
Unfortunately, Casey had an accident, but she’s all better now! What the hell kinda “accident” did that!?