Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0014837, Tue, 6 Feb 2007 19:16:24 +0000

Subject
Re: Butterfly "Erebia embla" transformed into Erebia Zembla by
GOOGLE
Date
Body
On 3/2/07 03:33, "D. Barton Johnson" <chtodel@COX.NET> wrote:

> FROM: Don Johnson. Computers sometimes do strange things:
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Did you mean: "Erebia zembla" Nabokov
>
> Equally weird--my spell checker "corrected" Erebia to Arabia.
>
>
> DBJ: certainly Œstrange to humans¹ but not, thankfully, Œstrange for
> computers.¹ The various search algorithms plod on mechanically with no
> distracting knowledge or understanding of literature, geography or
> lepidoptery. Or of anything else, really, apart from the ability to Œmatch¹
> certain meaningless bit patterns in ever-growing databases at ever-increasing
> speeds. The last thing we want is for these algorithms to behave like
> fanciful, random, imaginative humans ‹ those who see possibly signficant links
> between ŒZembla¹ and Œembla¹ beyond the sharing of five characters. The search
> engines build and constantly update many indices and links in order to handle
> misspellings and Œnear matches.¹ They simply (well, it¹s not that simple!)
> find strong correlations with the strings ŒNabokov¹ and Œembla¹ under
> ŒNabokov¹ and ŒZembla.¹ Googling just ŒErebia embla¹ will not invoke Œzembla.¹
>
> The Erebia to Arabia Œcorrection¹ can be avoided by (i) adding ŒErebia¹ to
> your spell-check¹s dictionary, as you may have probably done already! (ii)
> switching off Œauto-correct.¹
>
> Yr devoted servant-savant-student
>
> Stan Kelly-Bootle
>
>


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