FROM: Don Johnson. Computers sometimes do strange things:
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Did you mean: "Erebia zembla" Nabokov

Equally weird--my spell checker "corrected" Erebia to Arabia.


DBJ: certainly ‘strange to humans’ but not, thankfully, ‘strange for computers.’ 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 ‘match’  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 ‘Zembla’ and ‘embla’ beyond the sharing of five characters. The search engines build and constantly update many indices and links in order to handle misspellings and ‘near matches.’ They simply (well, it’s not that simple!) find strong correlations with the strings ‘Nabokov’ and ‘embla’ under ‘Nabokov’ and ‘Zembla.’ Googling just ‘Erebia embla’ will not invoke ‘zembla.’

The Erebia to Arabia ‘correction’ can be avoided by (i) adding ‘Erebia’ to your spell-check’s dictionary, as you may have probably done already! (ii) switching off ‘auto-correct.’

Yr devoted servant-savant-student

Stan Kelly-Bootle

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