Slashdot Mirror
Top Searches of 2003, A Dave Odyssey, Banned Words for 2004
Shockmaster writes "Yahoo! has released their top searches of 2003. Google also has a year-end Zeitgeist wrap-up for popular search queries." Elsewhere, TheFairElf writes "The Miami Herald has Dave Barry's annual roundup of the year's main events titled 2003: A Dave Odyssey. The most significant events include the release of the fifth Harry Potter book 'Harry Potter Reaches Puberty and Starts Taking Really Long Showers' and the discovery of large quantities of sugar in Iraq which the CIA claimed 'is a leading cause of tooth decay'." Finally, wideangle writes "'Calling all metrosexuals: Get rid of that bling-bling - or at least find another word for it. In its annual compilation of language irritants, Lake Superior State University singled out 17 words and phrases that it says ought to be banned as overused, trite, euphemistic or just plain inaccurate." LOL, we wish everyone an Xtreme New Year from Slashdot, OMG.
http://www.metaspy.com/info.metac.spy/metaspy/unfi ltered.htm
See what people are searching for on MetaCrawler...
Click the one before it for the whole list.
As I understand it though, the term metrosexual specifficaly says the person isn't gay, which none of the others do. Both fop and dandy have strong gay implications, at least in their common usage. It's less about specifics of dress and more about fitting the sterotype of being gay presented by the general media while actually being straight.
Everything will be taken away from you.
You know what ticks me off more than people who mess up the meanings of precision and accuracy? People who mess then up but think they're right. If you make a measurement of 165.04452 +/- 50 (say, for example, meters of depth), it (the measurement) is not precise at all. Whether it is accurate or not depends on the actual value of the depth being measured.
.0005 --> precise, accurate .00005 --> precise, not accurate
To summarize, if the true depth was 165 m:
165.04452 +/- 50 --> not precise, accurate
165.04452 +/-
100 +/- 50 --> not precise, not accurate
100 +/-
See http://www.geoplace.com/gw/2000/1000/1000gps.asp as a reference, and think before you post next time.
How is it that the Harry Potter is second only to Britney Spears on the popular queries list and also below the Simpsons on the fictional characters list?
There is a reason that they put "place stamp here" on envelopes, and it's not because they think you don't know where it goes. This is to reinforce that they won't recieve mail "postage due," to draw a contrast to the envelopes that say "postage will be paid by the addressee" in the same place. (what, has everyone forgotten those?)
Basically it cuts down on the costs that the post office has to pay making it very clear to everyone that the addressee will NOT be paying for it. Otherwise they may have to get it halfway across the country before throwing it out.
Un-fucking-believable. I've never seen anyone write "intensive purposes" before, only "intents and purposes", but apparently the former is more common.