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Eid al-Fitr is now a “US Holiday” according to Apple: (Separately, nobody can write precisely precisely?) How about some new phrases, e.g., “As American as Eid al-Fitr”? (Eid al-Fitr is not on the analogous Google Calendar “Holidays in the United States”) Related: Profiles in Corporate Courage (Appl...

Per my usual, I didn’t watch Trump’s speech last night, but have peeked at the transcript. CNN establishes their neutrality in the first sentence: Americans are reeling from the early weeks of Trump 2.0 The Google, informed by Oxford, says the definition of reeling is “lose one’s balance and stagger...

Today was my last morning in San Francisco. Unhoused folks, whom the rich locals say they want to help, in front of the Rolex store and the safe deposit vaults for said Rolexes: Our hotel was right next to a BART station and BART goes all the way to SFO. What did The Google say about driving vs. BAR...

Instead of taking the Google Maps route on blind faith, we asked locals how to get out of the Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela. This took us through Belmonte, which we discovered was home to a Jewish museum and also a church on a traditional route to Santiago de Compostela. Belmonte has an otter s...

We used Google Maps in Portugal. It made quite a few absurdly bad routing decisions. To save a theoretical minute or two it would send our Mercedes E class sedan down roads narrower than a North Carolina dentist’s driveway. We were constantly terrified that a car would appear coming the opposite dir...

NVIDIA is the world’s most valuable company (P/E ratio of 75; compare to less than 40 for Microsoft), which also means that nearly every NVIDIA employee is rich. A lot of people slack off when they become rich. Google ended up with quite a few “vesting in peace” workers who didn’t contribute much. I...

Happy Pride! I wonder if this is based on my search history… I searched for the “Altis Prime Hotel” in Google Maps and I was shown a map with both the searched-for hotel and, presumably, what Google thought our family would prefer:

After nearly 20 years, my Gmail inbox is cluttered with over 90 GB of crud, including more than 48,000 unread messages. The majority of my non-spam email messages are irrelevant after a certain number of days, e.g., calendar notifications from Google Calendar, USPS “what’s going to be in your mailbo...

A tweet that senior New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof deleted is vaguely viewable via The Google: State-sponsored NPR and Kristof did not question the idea that 30,000 trucks were trying to get into Gaza right now. At a standard load of 80,000 lbs. per truck, this works out to 2.4 billion lbs. ...

“I feel the need for speed,” said my friend who flew the F/A-18 for the U.S. Navy to the Hertz folks in Tampa. They rented him a Volvo XC40 EV, purportedly capable of 293 miles of range. It’s 190 miles and 3 hours to get from Tampa to our neighborhood in Jupiter, according to The Google. It took him...

An email from The Google regarding a merchant replying to a review that I left two years ago (pre-ChatGPT): Here’s the full text of the reply: Thank you for taking the time to leave us a 5-star review for Calaveras Cantina in Jupiter. We are delighted to hear that you enjoyed our upscale Mexica...

If you ask Google about “Australian open tennis”, the noble software defaults to showing “women’s singles”: Note that uber-hater Margaret Court is highlighted at the bottom. From the Daily Mail: In 2017, Court – a Christian pastor – shocked countless tennis identities and supporters after she b...

“These Teens Got Therapy. Then They Got Worse.” (Atlantic, by Olga Khazan; paywalled, but readable in the Google cache): Researchers in Australia assigned more than 1,000 young teenagers to one of two classes: either a typical middle-school health class or one that taught a version of a mental-hea...

I was surprised when listening to Elon Musk at the important role Musk played in the founding of OpenAI (I had heard that at one point, but then forgot it). Before he was worried about population collapse, Musk was worried about AI. His interest in LLMs seems to date from 2013 when he invested $5 m...

Following this weekend’s unfortunate events in Jacksonville, Florida, a gun-loving friend sent me a CNN article and remarked on the phrase “white gunman” occurring within the first three words. I used the Google to find the precise phrase “white gunman” on cnn.com: 158 results. Compare to “Black...

My favorite NYT headline of August 5, 2020 characterizes schools that are 100-percent closed as “open fully”: Supporting those in New York, Maskachusetts, Chicago, and California who now say that lockdowns and school closures never happened, this headline cannot be found either with a Google sear...

A game will occur today that The Google calls “NCAA Men’s Basketball”. Yet, in fact, nothing stops an athlete identifying with a gender other than “male” from joining either of the participating teams. From the NCAA’s rules: And from Smith College: Note that “such a team is eligible for a men’...

FastCompany says that Apple and Google will kill Twitter by removing the app from their respective monopoly stores if they see anything on Twitter that they don’t like. Twitter, obviously, will remove anything and anyone that the company deems objectionable. Historically this was people who did not...

I’m back in our AirBnB in Paris where we live like the guys in La Boheme if they had 500 Mbit symmetric fiber Internet. No longer limited to 0.5 GB of mobile data per day at $10 (the Verizon Travel Pass; Google Maps by itself can consume close to this quota), it is time to check the New York Times. ...

An article from Belgium, translated from French by The Google, “Eight objectives to streamline the approach to unaccompanied foreign minors”: Today, 2670 young people are welcomed in the Fedasil network and by the communities, compared to 1029 in 2019. In 2021, Belgium saw a total of 3351 young peo...

Folks who’ve been unpersoned by Twitter, Facebook, and/or YouTube/Google might feel that their practical freedom of speech is gone. The good is is that it can be bought back from the U.S. Mint for $1,595 via the First Amendment to the United States Constitution 2022 Platinum Proof Coin – Freedom of ...

How is Women’s History Month going for you? Here’s what happens when you type “women’s history month” into an incognito browser (i.e., not affected by your previous search history): Note that Black History Month and National Hispanic Heritage Month are related events, as far as Google is concerne...

An immigrant friend’s comment on news from the CNN executive suite: These are defenders of liberal morality and destroyers of glass ceilings A Google search for “glass ceiling” si…

Our 8-year-old ran out of books to read on our recent excursion around the Florida Free State. Google Maps showed us that the most convenient bookstores between Lakeland and Tampa were in… Br…

If you remembered to put your Canon mirrorless system in the back of the Rolls Royce for the trip to the Bal Harbour mall, here’s the Google Maps suggestion for where to stop and take picture…

There are occasional moments of humor in the life of a software expert witness. Here’s part of a fact witness deposition transcript: (For the Google: Are you being compensated in any way in c…

Google spec’d a bigger sensor than what Apple uses in the latest iPhones and, therefore, should have been able to crush Apple in image quality. DxOMark says otherwise. In lab conditions, the …

Google Calendar informs me, via its “Holidays in United States” calendar, that today is both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day. So… to all readers who celebrate incom…

We started the war in Afghanistan in 2001. The country’s total population then was 21.6 million (Google). The estimated 2021 population is 40 million (source). If roughly half of Afghans don’t like…

“After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again” (NYT), by Emi Nietfeld (Harvard CS graduate): I bought into the Google dream completely. In high school, I spent time h…

From the Dutch NPR (February 9, 2021) plus Google Translate: ‘German ministry hired scientists to induce corona fear’At the beginning of last year, the German Ministry of the Interior w…

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (not to be confused with Dr. Jill Biden, M.D.), at 1:51 in this 1966 interview: A riot is the language of the unheard. Is it fair to say that Amazon, Apple, Google, and …

Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, a pioneer in minicomputers, disparaged microprocessors for controlling houses back in 1977: In 1977, referring to computers used in home aut…

From The Google: Vietnam population: 95 millionLaos population: 7 millionCambodia population: 16 million Number of deaths from Covid-19 so far among these nearly 120 million people? WHO data: 0. Pe…

“Some Countries Are Taking Social Distancing More Seriously Than Others” (Bloomberg) contains some fascinating data collected by Google. They can figure out whether or not people in any…

Top of my Gmail, day after the New Hampshire primary: How do folks think the Nevada caucuses will shake out today? Are there enough government workers and people on the traditional welfare system i…

Turning Google Contacts into address labels for Christmas/New Year’s cards is a task that I expected to be simple. The plan was export to “Google CSV” formatupload to avery.com to…

Aside from missing family and friends and finding that wearing an air pollution mask tended to fog up my glasses, one reason that I was happy to return home from China was that it was no fun being …

… like to hire a lot of white and Asian males, apparently. The “Best CEOs for Diversity 2019” has a bunch of Silicon Valley titans right at the top. Sundar Pichai of Google is the…

Back in 2014, I wrote about Oberlin College setting up special dorms for students with darker skin and/or less family money. Much funnier is this recent video (not de-platformed by YouTube/Google y…

James Damore, the Google Heretic, was cast out for saying that intelligent people who identify as “women” did not enjoy staring at a screen and typing out pages of boring C and Java cod…

Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and it automatically get…

People often are drawn to computer nerdism partly because they prefer interacting with machines rather than with other people. (James Damore made this point while working at Google and learned that…

… but they apparently hate the Trump Winery. A promotional email from info@trumpwinery.com was flagged by the Gmail system as spam. (If you want to start a conversation at a New Year’s …

A subclass of employees of Google today will stop working and “walk out” (to where? a suburban parking lot?). The management of the company says that they support this walkout. Can we i…