Zubeneschamali

Today's challenge: only pictures. Kind of appropriate since I just started a tumblr (zubenpics) with the goal of posting one pic per day. Follow me if you want, and tell me who to follow in return!

( Pics I have taken... )

Where I am, it's 3/14, and it's 1:59 P.M. Happy Pi Day, everyone!

So last year I asked y'all to search for "ground..." and see what came up on your Google autofill feature. The results were pretty interesting, and when I showed them to my class, they thought they were pretty interesting, too, and it made a nice little lesson in how place matters in the digital era. :)

Academics being academics, someone has decided to do a more rigorous study of this phenomenon. So if any of you need to kill some time, they're looking to produce an Autocomplete map of the world based on how Google autofills the names of the countries of the world. AKA "crowdsourcing the geography of autocomplete". Take a look!

In case you're wondering what I was asking you to do earlier in the week with the "ground" thing...

So you might have heard about this little disagreement going on in New York about a proposed community center/mosque on the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory.  Setting aside the politics of the whole thing, I saw this blurb about how typing "ground" into Google resulted in an automatic completion of "ground zero mosque" before any other phrase, including just plain "ground zero".  Then someone pointed out that it seems to depend on where you are, and I thought, aha!  I know people from all over the world who could do this little experiment for me so that when I talk in class later this semester about how Google is not the neutral, taken-for-granted search engine that we all assume it is, this would be a great illustration that the results you get depend in part on where you are:

( Table below the cut... )

Chicago was the first city eliminated from the Olympic bidding?  Seriously?  Wow, that's embarrassing.

ETA: Hurray for Rio!  Congrats!