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The Gyllenhaal Experiment
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- jstanley 8y agoThis looks cool but I don't understand the results. The correct path is the one highlighted in blue. Is the most popular path the one that always follows the largest child? Or is the top-most child the most popular one? This is unambiguous on the Britney Spears example, but not on Zooey Deschanel, for example. Also, I'd never heard of half of these people so had no idea how their name should be spelt.
- danielsf 8y agothe correct path is always blue. path popularity is based on line thickness.
- Liquix 8y agoThe most popular/well traveled route is the largest.
- ericsoderstrom 8y agoI'm pretty sure it's just the width of the path that corresponds to how popular it is.
- curtis 8y agoIt seems likely that I am not the only person who can't spell Chuck Palahniuk's last name. Edit: Now that I think about it, it might be more accurate to say that nobody can spell Chuck Palahniuk's last name...
- jandrese 8y agoMost people can't even pronounce it. I'm guessing the spelling is more natural if you speak Ukrainian.
- jimbobimbo 8y agoIn Ukrainian - yes, but not in English.
- jandrese 8y agoIs this one of those cases where the wage slave at Ellis Island did a craptastic job of transliterating the name and they've been stuck with it ever since?
- gnomewascool 8y agoIt's a case of the Latin transliteration not having a "natural"/intuitive pronunciation in English and hence a made-up pronunciation being used.[0] I think that the transliteration itself was "correct" (assuming that the original Ukrainian was Палагнюк). [0] https://chuckpalahniuk.net/author/frequently-asked-questions-about-chuck-palahniuk#biographical-1 https://chuckpalahniuk.net/author/frequently-asked-questions...
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoWhere did the "g" (г) go, Palagniuk seems closer (or Palagnyuk may be better?). I know a little Russian, perhaps this is different in Ukrainian?
- cannam 8y agoOh that was disappointing - I hadn't heard of one of them so I hit what I thought was the "skip" button, and it took me straight to the results of all of the questions without letting me try any of the rest. I realise that this is because I am stupid - there is a warning, but I thought it was just warning me I wouldn't be able to try that question again, not that I wouldn't be able to try any of them. (It said that you wouldn't be able to go back again, but I didn't want to go back - I wanted to go forward.) Boo.
- umvi 8y agoRight click link -> Open link in incognito window Hacky workaround, yes, but this is HN after all
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- ouid 8y agoor you can just delete your site cookies. I strongly doubt that they are fingerprinting you.
- ClassyJacket 8y agoThe same thing happened to me
- esolyt 8y agoNo, you're not stupid. "Skip" implies moving to the next item "Skip to results" is a confusing way to phrase it. I guess "Go to results" would've made more sense. Weirdly, the actual skip button is labeled "Show Me Another". Apparently, it happened to a lot of people. It's bad UX in an otherwise amazingly designed article.
- Pigo 8y ago>Chuck Palahniuk I've been reading his books since I found out who wrote Fight Club in 1999. My brain does NOT want to remember how to spell his name. It makes me feel like I have a learning disability.
- js2 8y agoI can never spell "bureaucracy" correctly without assistance. I always have to spell check it. Sometimes I can't even get close enough to spell check. I can't think of any other English words I have such trouble with.
- d-sc 8y agoThe other day I got some funny looks when I yelled ‘exercise’ at my phone in a locker room because I couldn’t remember how to spell it.
- SamBam 8y agoI always go through "exersize", no, wait, "exercize", no, wait, "exercise." I always get there, but it always takes me there tries.
- dasyatidprime 8y agoIs it easier to spell “bureau” itself correctly? If so, you might be able to use that as a mnemonic. You can also take the “-cracy” part from other words like “democracy”.
- tunesmith 8y agoI can only get it if I mispronounce it in my head. I think "bureau" and "cracy". I guess that's not so helpful.
- btilly 8y agoI learned to spell it by learning enough French to know how to spell bureau. Then it was easy.
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- rf2019 8y agoThis explains a lot of misspellings on envelopes I get through the mail, and it would be good to see this with your own name. It must be really sad if you’re Matthew mcconaughey and two thirds of the time your name is spelled wrongly in some way. Still, he’s doing ok
- mikepurvis 8y agoYeah I'm sure he finds a way to cope.
- jethro_tell 8y agoThere's also a difference between randos talking about you on the Internets and serious people spelling your name. They probably don't get it wrong on his chair or trailer on set. It's probably spelled right on his checks and other documents and in most all correspondence of any value. I cannot spell half my teammates last names from memory, but I don't rely on that because it's important communication.
- smacktoward 8y agoWith enough bongos and weed you can get through anything! (For the young 'uns out there that don't get the reference: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/actor-mcconaughey-nude-bongo-bust-0 http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/actor-mcconaugh...)
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoThe problem is that people with the same name spell it differently, so we're just trying to recall arbitrary [often phonetic] misspellings accrued -- often by illiterate people -- over generations. If your family immigrated somewhere there's a good chance the immigration official gave you your current family name spelling. For me, my surname has about a dozen variations that arise, it seems, from mediaeval British spelling variants. If I tell people my name then they usually spell it according to the variant they've commonly seen, but more often than not they get it wrong. I don't personally know any of the people in the study, but I've seen most of the names in writing before ... ScarJo just happens to have the same spelling as my friend with the same surname. I'm not sure what any of it proves? Also, spellcheck? That surely perverts the results.
- lifeisstillgood 8y agoA fun dataset (how many people cannot spell using Google's text box) but a couple of points 1. I could not recognise my first picture so had to use the speech tab - which I swear sounds like Mark McGuires (with the S). So I add the extra S and of course get it "wrong". I know I am being picky but ... Secondly, how much of this dataset is Google being too good at correcting our spelling - I know I regularly send google bad spellings simply because my thumbs cannot be bothered to rewind on a small phone when google is 99% likely to show me what I meant anyway. Is there a comparison between mobile spelling percentage and desktop / keyboard spelling percentages - I suspect we all spell better on a keyboard than a phone ?
- danielsf 8y agoThis is a live dataset. All the examples except for Britney Spears are using user-submitted answers.
- lifeisstillgood 8y agooh I assumed they had google data OK so still same question applies - do we spell differently on mobiles vs keyboards - is spelling an intellectual thing or a cannot be bothered thing?
- moftz 8y agoI misspell more words on a mobile device than a real keyboard. I used to use IRC over an ssh terminal and would occasionally connect using my phone when I was out of the house. The app wouldn't do autocorrect for anything typed into the terminal so my spelling was atrocious due to hitting the wrong buttons sometimes. At home using a real keyboard, I had a much easier time. I still spelled words wrong but those were words that I just don't know how to spell.
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- abecedarius 8y agoWent through five celebrities before the first I recognized. Would be nice to see how many of us can spell e.g. Dijkstra.
- phaedryx 8y agoI've probably read his name more times than the names of these celebrities.
- StavrosK 8y agoI'd never even heard of Peekaboo Street or whatever her name is before. I got almost everyone else right, at least.
- rootusrootus 8y agoI think it's age specific. If you're in the right age group you've heard of most of them. I got most wrong because I'd never heard of them, but Picabo Street is just a little older than me and she was well known in the late 90s.
- StavrosK 8y agoI'm almost 40, but I guess it's because I'm Greek, so I'd never heard of her.
- rgoulter 8y agoThe mnemonic which was pointed out to me was the "ijk" is in order.
- kazinator 8y agoAn alarmingly frequent misspelling is "Ghandi" instead of "Gandhi".
- blueline 8y agowhy is that alarming? "i know there's an h in the name, but i forget where it goes..." => Ghandi seems like an extremely understandable mistake for an english speaker
- philipodonnell 8y agoAny idea what the visualization package is here that is creating those charts?
- eternalny1 8y agoBrutal. Those were far more difficult than expected, I generally veered off path around half-way on most of them. Very interesting experiment, my pride notwithstanding (sp?).
- tobr 8y ago> I generally veered off path around half-way on most of them. That's something misleading about this visualisation... It makes it look like you got it more wrong because you have a letter wrong early in the word, even if every letter after it is right.
- BEEdwards 8y agoI get what you're saying, but the cool path thing is unique paths not correctness of spelling.
- __david__ 8y agoAgreed, I would have loved to see it more like a detour along the correct spelling. Almost like a character based diff.
- SamBam 8y agoPersonally I loved seeing the veering path for M. Night Shyamalan: https://imgur.com/a/Es5Q0nQ https://imgur.com/a/Es5Q0nQ. Everybody said "There's a Y here somewhere," and veered off at a different point. But a detour-based viz would have also looked cool: just a bunch of Y's stacked above the name, each one a different attempted insertion point.
- pudding_gay 8y agoDude, I fucking hate this fucking domain name. What kind of asshole seriously registers these domains?
- sexy_seedbox 8y agoThose "Mc" vs "Mac" surnames are tough.
- fancyfish 8y agoFun fact: "Mac" is the original Irish surname prefix meaning "son of," and "Mc" is the Anglicized form. McDonald = Son of Donald. As is usual, Irish names are patronymic meaning they're relating to the male's lineage. A daughter would be "Nic" (daughter of the son of) and wife "Mhic" (wife of the son of). Then why so few "Nic"s and "Mhic"s? The Anglicized form isn't so particular about gender, so females use "Mac/Mc." The "O'" prefix as in "O'Donnell" means "descendant of," along with its female variants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_name
- onorton 8y agoWhat's funny now is that in Northern Ireland (not too sure about down south) we tend to read "Mc" as probably Irish and "Mac" as Scottish.
- robaato 8y agoDid some programming for analysis of the Middle English Dialect project way back when. This was based on corpus of 320 words as they were spelt by scribes in different parts of the UK. Often the same scribe would spell a word 3 or 4 different ways in the same document. But there were regional variations etc. Fascinating topic. Helped to draw maps like: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme_frames.html http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme_frames.html http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/?page_id=563 http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/?page_id=563
- okbake 8y agoThe visualizations here are great. I really like how it represents the different branches of a tree structure
- wumms 8y agoHas anybody else also problems with a buggy input field? I tried writing "Palahniuk". Here I stopped typing after the h: PPALPPALAHPPALPPALAHAN
- schlowmo 8y agoYes, I also had the same issue with Chrome 72 on Android. Probably saved myself some shame though.
- Sniffnoy 8y agoI really don't like the interface here. It is way too easy to accidentally hit the wrong button and spoil what you're doing. I had to delete my cookies for the page in order to get around the "no going back" after I accidentally hit the wrong button.
- pkamb 8y agoI'd love a Mac app or keyboard shortcut that simply corrected the nearest "red squiggly line" misspelled word in your current textbox.
- Zigurd 8y ago0% of Starbucks cups end up with a correct spelling of "Zigurd."
- ccvannorman 8y agoHow is Bernardent Cufnersnatch not on this list?!
- mirimir 8y agoThe site doesn't work in Firefox or Midori.
- vharish 8y agoI blame English for this :D
- Xophmeister 8y agoPercentages would be more illustrative than absolute values, I feel. It looks like the visualisation partially accounts for relative proportion, with the width of the branches, but it's not a linear scale.
- ATsch 8y agoWhatever this author has done to the input field has really screwed it up on my phone. I type "Kae" and it just ends up as "KaekaeKae", any attempts to hit backspace just duplicate the input text again and again.
- mathgenius 8y agoWhere is the journalism here? Where is the story? I don't see any. "People can't spell" isn't a story...
- kbutler 8y agoNames are probably the least-interesting thing to study with respect to spelling, because they are completely arbitrary and there is so much variation even in identical-sounding names. How many variants can you find for "Mikayla"?
- justtopost 8y agoWho are these people? How am I supposed to spell random persons names if I have to google who they are to begin with?