Sunday, November 04, 2012

[jules' pics] More mantis

Matilda seems to have disappeared from the wisteria, but Gertrude is hanging out on the house. Gertrude is a very small giant asian mantis, and it is a bit surprising that s/he is not dead yet. Not only not dead, s/he is still skinning up drain pipes.
Mantises
Mantis - Giant Asian
The worrying thing is that when I search for Giant Asian Mantis on Google to check what the species looks like, the second image is one I took (although hosted on some other website). This almost as bad as the time I searched for information about a scientific concept that I didn't know much about, found an interesting link that I thought might enlighten me, and was very disappointed to discover a link to one of my own papers. Is must be the fault of Google, trying to find pages it thinks I want to find? Are there internet universes out there that I can never discover?

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/04/2012 07:32:00 PM
Posted by James Annan at Sunday, November 04, 2012

3 comments:

Hank Roberts said...

> Google, trying to find pages
> it thinks I want to find?

Definitely. Create several userids, starting from different computers/routers/phone lines, and you will different results on exactly the same search string.

It's the nastiest, creepiest, scariest thing about Google results.

It's not showing you what's there. It's showing you what will attract your attention to the page and keep you watching.

You're the product they're selling.

If you turn off AdBlock and NoScript and Ghostery, so you actually see the crap they're larding up the pages with -- and compare those different fake points of view -- it becomes blatantly obvious.

Ya know what?

We need a reference librarian for the Internet.

Google ain't helping us.

Google is serving us -- baked, fried, or fricaseed.

4/11/12 3:37 pm
Vinny Burgoo said...

By a similar process, I am now a world expert on gauging the temperature of wood-fired bread ovens. The second (and last) time I fired up my recently discovered bread oven I took a snap and posted it at Wikipedia along with speculation about what the whitening of the surface of the bricks might mean. This photo is now very popular with commercial breadmakers in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, some of whom echo the guff about whitening bricks as though it were fact.

Is it fact? Of course. The Web says so.

4/11/12 8:27 pm
James Annan said...

Hank, just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you :-)

4/11/12 11:35 pm

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