Google's mock Picasa site on April Fools' Day. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google loves its April Fools' jokes, and this year a prank emerged in the form of CADIE--an artificial-intelligence research project with a cute panda avatar--taking over the search giant.
"We're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions," according to a CADIE description accompanying the faux announcement.
The site pointed to CADIE's YouTube channel and CADIE's blog.
Among CADIE's abilities:
• Gmail Autopilot, which answers your e-mail for you.
• Chrome updated for use with red-and-blue 3D glasses (predictably but disappointingly, the CADIE Chrome EULA looks unmodified from the original).
• A Picasa Web Albums feature to add red-eye to your photos.
• Brain Search for Mobile (with a graphical tip of the hat to XKCD, I'm guessing).
Google offered a faux version of Chrome to be used with 3D glasses. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Here's Google's description of the bogus feature of Picasa 4.1.
New! Automatic Red-Eye Addition
Approximately 4.1 seconds after achieving sentience, Google's new Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity scanned the corpus of online digital photographs and discovered the exceptionally popular but difficult to achieve photographic technique known as "red-eye."
Having established that "red-eye" is an aesthetically pleasing effect implying superior broad-spectrum lux measurement capability, CADIE has directed the human Picasa Team to introduce Auto-Red-Eye. No more "clicking and hoping" for that telltale glow; now you can simply select any photo(s) and a lovely red-eye effect will appear (unless there are no eyes in the shot whatsoever, in which case the image will be destroyed).
(Note that 4.1, whether seconds or version numbers, can also be read as April 1.)
Google inverted some YouTube videos for April Fools'.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Also, I didn't detect a CADIE reference, but YouTube inverted its videos and text of videos linked from its home page (perhaps with this Unicode font inversion technology).
"Our internal tests have shown that modern computer monitors offer better picture quality when flipped upside-down," the video-sharing site said on its blog. "The page also makes it simpler for you to view content in the southern hemisphere."
Also, note the GPS-enabled gBall from Google's Australian outpost.
There's something of a cottage industry on the Internet of making parodies through artful subtitles of Der Untergang, a movie about the last throes of the Third Reich. And now there's one that takes on Nikon's D3X, the company's new $8,000, 24.5-megapixel SLR.
The subtitles depict Adolf Hitler coming to terms with the arrival of Sony's Alpha A900. One amusing moment comes when a minion listening to Hitler's rant comforts a weeping colleague, "There, there, I hear he shoots only JPEG." (In case the humor is lost on you, that's a jab at pixel-peeping camera snobs such as myself who prefer to shoot raw images.)
According to The Online Photographer, where I spotted the video Tuesday, the parody is by Nikon D3 photographer Samuel Vert.
The We Demand Donuts group takes a jab at those who objected to Flickr's new video service.
(Credit: Flickr)First came Flickr video on Tuesday. Then came the anti-Flickr-video outcry on Wednesday. Now there's the anti-anti-Flickr-video outcry.
This last movement takes the highly facetious form of Flickr's new We Demand Donuts group. "If we get 20,000 people to join the group Flickr will be forced to give us free donuts!" the group's manifesto states. "Join the group and invite all your contacts. We will make this the biggest protest group on Flickr and force them to give us free donuts!"
There are some subtleties here, but given the timing, it's pretty clear that this group's raison d'etre can be translated as, "Give us a break, Flickr members who are signing petitions demanding that Flickr scrap its new video service."
More than 550 have joined so far. The No Video on Flickr group has more than 9,700.
Update 8:08 a.m. April 11: Flickr capitulated, at least on a geographically limited basis. "We at FlickrHQ have heard of your noble efforts and seek to answer your cries for justice," said Matthew Rothenberg, a Flickr employee, in the group's discussion board. He promised to buy doughnuts for Flickr members who meet up at a yet-to-be-determined San Francisco shop April 16.
Update 7:40 p.m. PST January 6: Thanks to alert reader OneGB for supplying the origin of the clock. The central design may look like a bungled biohazard symbol, but it in fact is another three-nine reference, the "hurricane" symbol of a high-IQ organization called the Triple Nine Society. The group also sells Triple Nine aprons, mugs, bibs, underwear, and other whatnot at CafePress.com.
(Credit:
Dean Hunt, StreetLessons)
Math enthusiasts who don't want to move totally into the digital realm might appreciate this analog clock.
Each number is expressed as a calculation involving three instances of the number 9.
For example, 5 o'clock is the square root of nine (3), factorial (3x2x1 = 6), minus 9/9 (6-1 = 5).
The trickiest time is 7 o'clock, whose calculation works out to 6.99999..., with an infinite number of nines. Wikipedia assures us that 0.99999... really does equal 1, so no worries that the clock is cheating there.
While we're on the subject of archaic clock technology, how come clocks and watches with Roman numerals represent 4 o'clock with IIII rather than the traditional IV? A friend told me it was because it was easier for illiterate people to comprehend, but I'd love to see some history about this.
(Via Bad Astronomy Blog.)
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