11 ms·
Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough
- kps 2y agoSadly, Google (Gemini) is aware of the quote, and does not provide an unbiased determination as to whether four seconds is enough to hot up the disintegrator.
- pigeons 2y agoClaude refuses to answer because it won't assist with information about weapons.
- sohkamyung 2y agoThe quote in full is: "I Had Exactly Four Seconds To Hot Up the Disintegrator, and Google Had Told Me It Wasn’t Enough"
- interestica 2y ago> Chandler played cricket when he was young, and he may have been influenced by the term “google” which is applied to balls which break or swerve. I think the author means “googly”
- emmelaich 2y agoYep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googly
- qup 2y agoThere's a documentary called Mountain Talk and the folks in the Appalachians used an adjective "si-goggling" which meant out of square, crooked. Lots of similarities there, too.
- fundad 2y agoI'm old enough to recall my youth glueing irises loosely encased in occipital domes onto craft projects. The kids today call them googly eyes.
- IggleSniggle 2y agoIn my pre-Google youth we also called them googly eyes and I honestly believed that was why Google picked that name. I always imagined the two OOs as eyes, sort of like amazons a->z arrow is a smile. See also the campfire classic "going on a bear hunt" and the line "two big googly eyes..."
- pimlottc 2y agoI get stuck into some kind of infinite reload loop on iOS Safari for this site, anyone else?
- tsujamin 2y agoYep same, I thought it was lockdown mode but it’s nice to know it’s just generally broken!
- throw310822 2y ago"Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction. It’s a scream. It is written like this: “I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. Then I got stuck into some kind of infinite reload loop on iOS Safari for this site- I thought it was lockdown mode but it’s nice to know it’s just generally broken"
- MobiusHorizons 2y agoWorked fine for me on iOS safari just now. Maybe it was temporary?
- CoastalCoder 2y agoNo problem for me with Chrome on Android.
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- latexr 2y agoNo issue for me on Safari, on both iOS 18 and macOS 15. But I know what you mean regarding the infinite reload loop, it happens to me on Bloomberg.
- causal 2y agoLove the irony of someone mocking science fiction being an accidental prophet
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoSomething something infinite monkeys, something something Nostradamus. I'm sure Captain Beefheart lyrics are prophetic too, like Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish.
- detourdog 2y agoHis lyrics are prophetic but somehow he always plays the exact opposite note than one might expect.
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoThe old man the boat.
- card_zero 2y agoThe horse raced past the barn fell?
- giraffe_lady 2y agohttps://knowyourmeme.com/memes/apollos-gift-of-prophecy-dodgeball https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/apollos-gift-of-prophecy-dodg...
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- kylebenzle 2y agoThe name Google was chosen because it's kind of sciency and sounds funny. Googly, Goggle, Gogle... It's a funny word that's been used for 100+ years. No irony necessary for a word to be reused for its intended purpose.
- scotty79 2y agoChandler's parody sounds as if somebody discovered salt and immediately put a spoonful into their dish. Still while I read through it I was curious about every term used. While if it featured mundane things like doors, guns, grass and whatever I'd be immediately bored.
- zooq_ai 2y agoBalls that go in the opposite direction (of normal) is called Googly
- bisRepetita 2y agoReminds me of the people who looked for time travelers, hoping they would have betrayed themselves through chronologically wrong Google searches or tweets. https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/google-search-fails-find-any-sign-time-travelers https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/google-search-fails...
- lostemptations5 2y agoWe are real though.
- nick3443 2y agoSorry I missed our coffee date next Tuesday.
- julesallen 2y agoGo easy on calling yourselves "QI", the hugely entertaining BBC TV show might have some qualms about this. https://www.qi.com/ https://www.qi.com/
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- gpvos 2y agoThe website has existed since at least 2010, so I guess they are aware and have considered this.
- card_zero 2y agoThe whole thing: "I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right." I like how Chandler writing sci-fi sounds exactly like Chandler writing one of his gumshoe stories. It's terse and tense and cynical. The protagonist drives a vehicle into some kind of ambush, and everything's incredibly snappy (including the scenery). Not at all like the actual sci-fi author who turned the parody into a complete story, and felt compelled to discuss something in the middle of the action, and ruined the pace. I don't think "Google" here is a machine or all-knowing entity, sounds more like it's just some guy. With prior experience of disintegrating Brylls.
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- card_zero 2y agoHa, yes, a bitterly droll simile every third sentence, that was what was missing.
- fenomas 2y agoI'll be damned! One of my favorite Chandler quotes, I've posted this a lot of places over the years. That said, the last time I looked into it sources all agreed that the comic strip Barney Google was a very well-known pop-culture reference when Chandler wrote this, and will surely have been the first thing he or anyone he talked to would think of when hearing "Google". (TFA mentions this as if it was one of several possibilities, but the others seem very shaky.) So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name.
- Suppafly 2y ago>So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name. A lot of these 'mysteries' that get brought up over and over online tend to have very easy to figure out answers, but people would rather be confused for some reason.
- detourdog 2y agoThey are words out of their context and humans love to make meaning. Think how surreal things will get now that time has sped up from Chandler’s time. As mysteries they are powerful. So far there was only 1 commenter that knew of Barney Google. The knowledge spreads the mystery dies. I knew nothing of the passage before this thread and when I was reading through the comments. I thought this was recent sci-fi that was being posted at a site called tv tropes. The Google reference was obviously a future form factor for Google services.
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- xipho 2y agoFor a moment I thought quote-investigator was a LLM startup app, and was about to be seriously impressed by the attention to detail, citation list and meticulously formed credits, but alas, the origin was just a squishy human.
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- jerf 2y agoFor those who have not dipped into the so-called Golden or Silver Age science fiction, Chandler's pastiche is quite accurate. There was a lot of what TV Tropes (warning: TV Tropes) refers to as "Call A Rabbit a 'Smerp'": https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmeerp https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee... Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure. It would still be quite purple [1], though. A well-known trope of the time. For some reason TV Tropes hadn't covered it yet, though, so I guess we should cut the authors some slack on that front. I would consider "My breath froze into pink pretzels." effectively unredeemable, though. Malzberg's rehabilitation attempt on that fails, in my opinion, and by the time someone wrote around it I think the surrounding prose would already have passed the Purple Event Horizon itself. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose
- Jerrrrrrry 2y ago"My breath froze into pink pretzels." The temperature in the synthetic atmosphere wasn't precisely enough to prevent the character's exothermic respiration from condensing, inconveniently.
- jerf 2y agoIt's the word "pretzel", honestly. I can cover breath freezing pink by the standards of the era, no problem. Took a shot to the lungs & helmet and left to die on the ice planet. I doubt that would "really" produce frozen pink breath but what we would now consider "hard" sci-fi that would care about that sort of thing generally didn't travel with this sort of purple prose so that's not really an issue. But pretzels? Why is your breath freezing in pretzels? Even pretzel "rods", let alone twists?
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoThe atmosphere isn't homogenized perfectly, leading to turbulent condensation. Micheal Crichton's Sphere mentions this (actual) fact in regards to certain gases, such as Helium, being needed in high pressure environments to counter act oxygen poisoning and nitrogen narcosis, but due to differing thermal properties, can lead to hot/cold spots, thermal turbulence, etc.
- NKosmatos 2y agoI was today years old when I found out about Quote Investigator :-)
- karaterobot 2y agoBarney Google aside, it's worth wondering whether the same process that led to Google being called Google instead of Googol is what led Chandler to use that word: it's a memorable, alien-sounding word, misspelled.
- dylan604 2y agoAs a kid in the 80s, my parents bought an encyclopedia set that also had a set of companion books for kids. This is where I first learned about a google, and it was definitely google not googol. So it's been "misspelled" for quite some time if that's your belief
- wpollock 2y agoMaybe on purpose. Most print encyclopedias included small typos and small fake articles, so they could prove plagiarism if needed. (I use that same excuse to explain all my published errors:-)
- karaterobot 2y agoI don't know why it'd be a matter of belief, it's a known word with a known prescriptive spelling. I'm sure the encyclopedia editors would have liked to get it right. But it's an interesting anecdote. A googol is an uncommon item of vernacular usage, and basically trivia for most people. I remember hearing "a googolplex" on elementary school playgrounds, as an example of a number so large you couldn't conceive of it. "You're stupid times infinity", "No, you're stupid times infinity to the googolplex power", and so on. And since the word doesn't follow intuitive spelling rules in English, I imagine it would have been very easy to spell it wrong in the 80s, unless you happened to both have access to specific resources, and remembered to look it up.
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoThis is largest juxtaposition between familiarity and nostalgia against an outright alien uncanny facade of fiction. A dissociative, delirious, memory. Orthogonal to our current experience, but barely. These two songs are the closest I could find in an analogous auditory form. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE5JMEu5hZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE5JMEu5hZA
- nashashmi 2y agoI often wonder what would happen if the founders didn’t misspell the word. And today we would be saying Googolled.
- scotty79 2y agoI still have no idea how to reconcile by merging with gravitational time dilatation being infinite at event horizon.
- PaulHoule 2y agoMakes me think of https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/01/detecting-time-travelers-on-the-internet-is-remarkably-difficult/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/01/detecting-time-trave... And also Asimov's classic End of Eternity https://ia800500.us.archive.org/13/items/calibre_library_68.132.22.122.231/The%20End%20of%20Eternity%20-%20Isaac%20Asimov_59.pdf https://ia800500.us.archive.org/13/items/calibre_library_68.... where a time traveller who overshoots his target and winds up too far in the past posts a classified on March 28, 1932 with a picture of a mushroom cloud and the title All (the) Talk Of (the) Market As literature I think (1) it reads like Chandler, (2) reads like a non-genre writer imitating the genre such as E.B. White in The Morning of the Day they Did It (who even scoops Rachel Carson) https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1950-02-25/flipbook/026/ https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1950-02-25/flipbook... I'd say real genre writers such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Doc Smith were always more careful how they used neologisms and didn't just drop them out rapid fire in search of affect. But you sure see that in parodic material such as Calvin and Hobbes (which would parodize Chandler and sci-fi)
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- cyberax 2y agoI'm not saying that it was time travel, but it was time travel.
- dhosek 2y agoWhen Google first came on the scene, I often mistyped its domain name as googol.com. At some point since 1999, Google bought googol.com and redirected it to their site.
- nbernard 2y agoWell... Wernher von Braun wrote a SF novel in which the first mission to Mars discovers native Martians. These live underground and use hyperloop-like tunnels for transportation, and their leader is called the "elon"...
- phkahler 2y agoWhat book is that? Edit: Found it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
- ilamparithi 2y agoIt gets funnier if you consider the meme that Elon Musk is an alien who is building rockets just to go back to his home planet. :)
- aaronharnly 2y agoThis book from 1931 deserves a mention as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Google_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Google_Book it includes verses like: The sun is setting – Can't you hear A *something* in the distance Howl!!? I wonder if it's – Yes!! it *is* That horrid Google On the prowl!!! I own a copy of the 1979 edition and the illustrations are just wonderful.
- jujube3 2y agoThe Google: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/The_Google_monster.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/The_Goog...
- Nihilartikel 2y agoI'm reminded fondly of the opening chapter to QNTM's Fine Structure, which sets up the story with a similarly baffling (yet self consistent, in my opinion) but wildly evocative narration of a blazing dogfight across a multiverse of hyperspaces.
- mtndew4brkfst 2y agoOne of the ways I failed to enjoy Max Gladstone's Empress of Forever was that it seemed hellbent on coining a significant new glossary worth of vocabulary along the way. I had to be well rested and attentive to muddle through with some marginal comprehension of any given chapter's plot, I certainly couldn't read it while drowsy or distracted.
- renewiltord 2y agoA 'googly' is not a google, what is this nonsense hahaha. Seriously getting Baader-Meinhof from this website which I used to trust.
- kazinator 2y agoIn one of the episodes of the 1970's Japanese anime series Gatchaman (known in North America in a heavily edited and abridged form as Battle of the Planets) there is a sequence in which a navigation screen is shown. A destination point is shown with a pin mark exactly like that balloon thing on Google Maps. I can't remember which episode. I don't have that series on any hard drive any more.
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- soyiuz 2y ago"Mr. Google, the best filing clerk in the firm. Filing & Office Management: A Constructive Monthly Magazine on Business Methods. July 1921." https://x.com/dennistenen/status/1017125225484505090 https://x.com/dennistenen/status/1017125225484505090
- mannykannot 2y agoNick Lowe, in The Well-Tempered Plot Device, is quite brutal in his criticisms. https://ansible.uk/Ansible/plotdev.html https://ansible.uk/Ansible/plotdev.html
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- thaumasiotes 2y ago> the book “In the Plex” by journalist Steven Levy presented the following explanation for the name choice: >> Page’s dorm roommate suggested they call it “googol.” . . . “The name reflected the scale of what we were doing,” Brin explained a few years later. >> Page misspelled the word, which was just as well since the Internet address for the correct spelling was already taken. “Google” was available. This is interesting, since the story I heard was that they settled on the spelling after an early investor made a check out to that spelling.
- Modified3019 2y agoAh, this is an article about parody of sci-if slop. I had way too much trouble realizing the article wasn’t just machine generated nonsense. Poe’s law strikes again.