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Tyson Homosexual
Thanks to everyone who pointed me to the flub below. It was reported all over the place today. The error occurred on One News Now, a news website run by the conservative Christian American Family...
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Lost in Machine Translation
While I’ve been traveling over the last week or so, loads of people sent me a link to this wonderful image of a sign in China reading “Translate Server Error” which has been written up all over the...
View ArticleOSCON Keynote
This year, I was invited to give a keynote presentation on revealing errors at the annual O’Reilly Open Source conference. The keynotes this year were all short form — 15 minutes — but I tried to...
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Olympics Blue Screen of Death
Thanks to everyone who pointed me to the the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) that could be seen projected onto part of the roof of the birds nest stadium in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics...
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More Google News
In the very first thing I wrote about Revealing Errors — an article published in the journal Media/Culture — one of my core examples was Google News. In my discussion, I described how the fact that...
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Speed Camera
In the past, I’ve talked about how certain errors can reveal a human in what we may imagine is an entirely automated process. I’ve also shown quite a few errors that reveal the absence of a human just...
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Google Miscalculator
This post on a search engine blog pointed out a series of very strange and incorrect search results returned by Google’s search engine. A very complicated “black box,” many of the errors described...
View ArticleGoogle News and the UAL Stock Fiasco
I’ve beat up on Google News before but something happened this week that made me (and many of you who emailed me) believe it worth revisiting the topic. On September 9th, a glitch in the Google News...
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Send in the Clones
Earlier in the summer, Iran released this image to the international community — purportedly a photograph of rocket tests carried out recently. There was an interesting response from a number of people...
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Beef Panties
Many of the gems from the newspaper correction blog Regret the Error qualify as a revealing errors. One particularly entertaining example was this Reuters syndicated wire story on the recall of beef...
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Faces of Google Street View
This error was revealed and written up by Fred Beneson and first published on his blog. After receiving criticism for the privacy-violating “feature” of Google Street View that enabled anyone to easily...
View ArticleRevealing Errors in Zagreb
I’m going to be giving another revealing errors talk this week at the cultural center Mama in Zagreb, Croatia. The talk is scheduled for 14:00 on January 10th and will be part of the weekly skill...
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Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet
I was browsing this store for worker clothes in Germany a few weeks back when I noticed something funny in the bottom corner. I’ve highlighted the snafu in the screenshot below with a big red arrow....
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Show Me the Code
A while ago, Mark Pilgrim wrote about being prompted with a license agreement that looked like this. If, like most people, you have trouble parsing the agreement, that’s because it’s not the text of...
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The Case of the Welsh Autoresponder
Last year, I talked about some of the dangers of machine translation that resulted in a Chinese restaurant advertised as “Translate Server Error” and another restaurant serving “Stir Fried Wikipedia.”...
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Quorum of the Twelve Apostates
A number of people (including the New York Times) wrote about a costly error at Brigham Young University last week that was originally reported by the Utah Valley Daily Herald. The error itself was...
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Deals, Failure, and Fun
I’ve found that the always entertaining FAILblog is a rich source for revealing errors. Here’s a nice example. Every reader on FAILblog can chuckle at the idea an item is being offered for $69.98...
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Akamai and SSL
SSL stands for “Secure Sockets Layer” and refers to a protocol for using the web in a secure, encrypted, manner. Every time you connect to a website with an address prepended with https://, instead of...
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Transparency
I caught this revealing error on the always entertaining Photoshop Disasters and thought it was too good to resist pointing out here: The picture, of course, is a bag of Tao brand jasmine rice for sale...
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GPS Errors and Pilgrimage to Lourde
The Telegraph ran an article about a sizable — and growing — number of Catholic pilgrims arriving in a small village in the Pyrenean foothills. With 94 residents, the town has no hotels or shops — a...
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