On June 12th, the US will finally make its transition to digital TV (DTV). Originally scheduled for February 17th, but delayed due to a lack of funding in the government’s converter box coupon program, the new transition date is now less than 3 weeks away. The DTV transition has been fraught with confusion, from poor consumer education to cable companies using the situation for their own gain. We’re going to break it down very simply.
I have two items for you on this Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend.
First up, if your Windows PC presents a screen like this photo I found on Ask The Admin when you try to start it up, something isn’t right. But if you look a bit closer you’ll see that it’s really quite a bit more abnormal than it appears. Or should I say, abngrmadl?
Start Wandows Ngrmadly
Second, Something Awful took Wolfram Alpha for a spin this week, just like the rest of us, with some humorously informative queries. Humorous because they start off by asking what portion of the US Gross National Product is represented by the film Ernest Goes to Camp and just get stranger from there, and informative because they illustrate the sort of data sets Wolfram Alpha has access to. Fair warning: Something Awful contains material of questionable taste and may not always be appropriate for work or children. There’s nothing too awful in this one, though. You can read the complete story here.
Ernest Goes to Camp as a percentage of the US Gross National Product
Have a great weekend, everybody!
If you’re really into American Idol like Michelle and I are you may have visited Dial Idol, a website that provides predictions about which contestant will win or lose each each week. The predictions are based on analysis of statistics gathered by their software, which allows users to cast their votes with their computer and a dial-up modem. The analysis is rather clever and generally accurate; it’s based largely on the number of busy signals encountered. With tens of millions of votes cast every week, not every call can be answered at once, and the difficulty in getting through can be used to gauge the behavior of people not using the Dial Idol software.
Mashable has an article today about another predictor of Idol results: Google. The theory is that you can see who Google users (i.e. everybody) are more interested in based on the number of searches for different contestants. Mashable looks at the Google statistics for past American Idol contests and makes a good case for the predictive power of the search engine. This year, if history is any guide, there’s a pretty clear front runner.
Google certainly seems to have the pulse of the people these days, and unlike subject specific tools like Dial Idol, Google is a generic tool. American Idol isn’t the only contest to be predicted by analyzing search traffic.
