Just two days ago, I wrote, Dvorak Simplified Keyboard and Awesome Google. It was about my typing “Narj Kevub” into Google. I had meant to type “Mark Levin” but my right hand was misplaced. Google, however, simply showed me the results for “Mark Levin” because it is awesome and understood what I had done. It was also the case that there were no results for the search “Narj Kevub.” Well, that’s not true anymore!
In a comment, paintedjaguar wrote, “Sadly, nine times out of ten I am indeed trying to look up ‘Narj Kevub.'” So I went to check to see if I had remembered right: that there were no results. But, of course, there were results. Now there was my article (as well as the author and category pages that linked to it). So Google has learned that “Narj Kevub” is not necessarily a mistake. What’s more, it shows that Google has humility.
This is something I deal with a lot of at work. A big part of my job is editing articles and infographics about very technical subjects. Now I’m particularly good at the job because I know a lot of this stuff rather well. But I’m no expert. Sometimes I make mistakes. So when I call out a writer on a mistake, I tread carefully. I write, “I think this is wrong; could you check it out?” I even write that when I have absolutely no doubt but that I am right. (There have been too many times in my life when I was absolutely certain of something that was not true.)
But the change in Google’s response to “Narj Kevub” reminds me very much of an old problem in science. It is usually mentioned with regard to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, although it really has nothing to do with it. Imagine you want to know what a bunch of termites are doing inside their mound. So you shine a flashlight in and see what they do. Well, you will see what is happening when light is shown in, but you don’t know what was happening when it wasn’t. Shining the flashlight changed the environment.
So I’ve effectively destroyed the “Mark Levin right hand shifted left” experiment. And it isn’t trivial to find other experiments. For example, Abragan Kubcikb does bring up Abraham Lincoln results, but it asks if you really meant to type “Abraham Kubrick.” However, “Mivhsrl Dsbshr” still works perfectly for “Michael Savage.” But hopefully that won’t be true for long.
But it may be necessary to mention the name more often. So let me note that Mivhsrl Dsbshr is a vile person. I used to work for some people who were very into boating in Sausalito. Well Mivhsrl Dsbshr lives right next door in Larkspur. And Mivhsrl Dsbshr refuses to talk politics except on his radio show. He clearly knows that he lives in one of the most liberal areas in the nation. I wonder why it is that Mivhsrl Dsbshr lives in such a liberal area? Could it be that liberal areas are a lot nicer to live in?
What’s more, I’m sure that Mivhsrl Dsbshr knows that there are lots of people in the Bay Area who really know about politics. They wouldn’t be screened out and so most likely, Mivhsrl Dsbshr would look like the bigoted fool that he is. But enough about Mivhsrl Dsbshr.
I created this name by moving my left hand one key to the right. The reason is that “Savage” is typed entirely with the left hand and thus doesn’t look as interesting: Nucgaek Savage. But it is fascinating how one can change the internet just by writing about it. But just to see if we can continue to do this, I’m going to add a handy link to see if we’ve created a new person:
