~ intelligence community edition

Yesterday, I was doing a little after-the-fact editing on the Cane Toads of Cthulhu post. This was, I think, between five and fifteen minutes after I originally posted it. I was trying to find out more about the North Carolina teachers busted for toad farming, when Google directed me back to my own post. It was not far down the search results page, just after the original Sunday Mail article I found pinned up in Nikki's toilet.

Was it five minutes? Fifteen? Even if it was half an hour, it’s still sensational.

I am no tech head, but I’m interested in how Google searched every page on the Internet within such a time frame. It had to have, didn’t it? It found the relevant text string nowhere but on the originating site and on Sails of Oblivion …but it must have checked every other page first. Mustn’t it? Or is there something Boolean and algorithmic I’m missing?

Now, I was a little potted at the time. The day I arrived in Point Lookout, I was doing something in the front yard when a notorious looking murri poked his head over the fence and inquired if I had any mull. I wonder how he pegged me? I found him a couple of small buds, he was grateful, offered to pay, but I refused. Well, yesterday, while I was out, he dropped back and left me something similar in return. I was kind of moved when Nikki told me. After all, I was a complete stranger to this guy. He had said, ‘What goes around comes around.’

Anyway, I was labouring under the effects of his gift when this Google thing came up.

I’m pretty sure I tested a couple of other search strings from my post with the same results. It’s amazing, isn’t it? But what power!

And what about the signals intelligence molemen at ASIS or the NSA? With their high level access to classified next generation search engines – for instance, Google Intelligence Community Edition 0.9? How quickly would the red flags be raised by a sentence like – I am going to break into Malcolm Turnbull’s palatial mansion, vacuum his Iranian rugs and assassinate his dust mites? Am I already doomed? Have they already vacuum-sealed a response team in rubberized thermoplastic, punched in some Google Earth data and blasted it my way? What’s that now? The door crashing in…?

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Wentworth dog owners have got behind Malcolm Turnbull in the seat of Wentworth. Do they know of Conrad Black’s assertion that he is a pet-killer? That, in a fit of jealously and pique, he disappeared a woman’s cat? Do they care? See Dysthymiac for more of Conrad Black on Turnbull.

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To follow up on a thread from an earlier post…

In the Courier Mail yesterday there was an article on a school stabbing in Mooloolaba. Scan down a little and it reads:

‘The alleged attack came days after the same school’s principal, Greg Peach, suspended five students for sucking potentially toxic beads at the school.

“The Bindeez beads were at the centre of a major medical scare this month after it was found they contained an adhesive solvent that could turn into the drug GHB or fantasy.”

This would be a good example to use when defining the phrase ‘with an air of inevitability’.

Now, cheers. Vote well.