Do you ever find yourself aimlessly surfing the internet? I don’t know if its procrastination or just my love for the world wide web, but I often run across some really cool stuff. Last night I ran across MacBattle. You know those 331 page forum threads full of pictures of Mac setups? Well MacBattle takes this idea 1 step further and puts 2 pictures head to head in a Mac setup death match (ok, maybe not that gruesome, but fun none the less!)
One the front page you’ll see two images side by side. Simple click on the picture that you think has the sweetest setup, this votes for that setup. Upon voting you an see the win percentage of each image. If can’t decide which of the two is the coolest then just click the ‘Consider it a Draw’ button between the images.
If you’re curious what the most successful pictures are, MacBattle has a Top 10 list. The picture that holds the #1 spot is a dual display setup with an iBook off to the side. As time passes I think that the picture to the left will float to the top and dethrone the dual display entry. I wish those were my Macs :) If you think you can do better or just want to play around go ahead and upload your setup and see how you fair.
If your looking for another fun way to kill 5-10 minutes check out GoogleBattle and find out which set of keywords have more results than others. My highest result is 8,500,000,000. If someone anyone finds a keyword with more results than that I’ll post what word I used. Hummm… this could get fun :)
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20,930,000,000
I got varying results with the same keywords depending on what time i did the search… that seems a little odd to me. The first time i searched i only got 10 billion results, but the blog was down, two hours later i got 20 billion with same search. you might want to try yours again.
The really ironic thing is that the first site on the results page for this search is: www.apple.com/getamac/ (it really is)
also note that while google may know of 2E10 results, the will only tell you where the first 1000 are…
Wow, your right. The search that gave me 8.5 billion before now gives me 17 billion. It was just the letter a. Thats kinda odd. I found it strange that the letter a gives more results than the letter e. You would think that the letter e would give more results since the letter e’s frequency in the English language is 12.7% compared to a’s 8.2%… according to this site.
*A*
I dont know what the * * does exactly, but I thought i would try it because in some other software it returns all results that contain whatever is between them, oddly enough *E* still produces less results that *A* so it can’t be treating the * * the way i thought it might.
LOL, thats the same search I did right before posting that comment. Your right. You were correct in how you understood the * character. The * is known as the wild card character. It takes the place of any number of characters. So if you do a search for *ot you should get {hot, bot, boot, root, …}. By placing the * before and after the word it means that any number of characters (even 0) can be before and after the letter. Its especially nice when searching for a word that could end with s, ed, ing. Because it will include all of those words in the results.
but if google was treating it that way it should return more results for *E* than *A* right?
You would think, but here’s my hypothesis why things are ending up differently.
It would be interesting to see what the letter frequency is of the words of the average persons vocabulary. They say that the average person uses between 10,000 and 25,000 words depending on their level of education. So although E may have the highest frequency in the English language, that may not be true of those 10,000 to 25,000 words.