Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Conceiving the Inconceivable

...in a sense.

   I was reading a psychology handbook today, and the relationship case study described someone as 'badgering' her girlfriend. Remembering how often I have to look up pictures of badgers on the internet, I realized that all the nouns and even the verbs on that page had searchable images related to them. But not the articles or prepositions. Doing what any reasonable person would do, I decided to see if anyone had conceived the inconceivable, that is, imagined the unimaginable, and put up a picture depicting the word 'at.' Then I realized that it would just show a bunch of pictures of @s. So I decided to do an image search of the word "a." Then I realized it would show a bunch of pictures of the letter "A." So I decided to do an image search of the word "an."

A lot of the results were... interesting. Mostly, as was to be expected, entirely unrelated junk. A lot of it was that Skyrim "I took an arrow in the knee" meme, which got old after about the fifth or sixth one, but there were a few that made me laugh out loud (okay, that one is better in context, I swear). I seriously think that here were more offensive images with safe search in heavy mode than in medium mode. Of course, it makes sense: why would these images get reported if nobody ever searches for the word "an?"

The word "of" turned out be be almost entirely clean, even with safe search firmly in the "off" position. Pictures of Lord of the Rings, Prince of Persia, that kind of stuff.

There was not, as far as I could tell, a single picture of The The on the search for The. The images here were just as innocuous as the word "of" with all the randomness of the word "an." Mostly just pictures of actors who were in movies that had the word "the" somewhere in them. Which is most movies.

So, uh, yeah. Morals here? Don't... don't... uh... Take arrows to the knee. Seriously, I mean it. It will mess you up, and you won't be able to be an adventurer anymore.

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