Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Affirmation that I have the best taste in everything

Yesterday:
  • Approximately 353,000 people were born.
  • Approximately 158,000 people died
  • Grant figured out how to rate movies on Netflix
  • 75-383 species of plants or animals became extinct.
  • Approximately 1.2 billion pounds of potatoes were consumed
Amazing, right! It turns out you just have to click on one of the five stars below a movie title to rate it!

Okay, so I rated a bunch of movies yesterday because I finally reached the end of my giant Netflix queue of all movies that people recommended to me as "YOU HAVEN'T SEEN HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE YET!?" I needed a recommendation, and Netflix promised to feed my ratings into a giant magical machine which would digest this information with math acid and deposit fresh steaming piles of suggested cinema at my feet. I imagine that the hordes of Netflix elves crank endlessly on recommendation machines that look sort of like this:



But with 50% less pasta.

Anyways, so I rate a bunch of movies, but I am just not that impressed with Netflix's initial suggestions for things I might like. I mean, I'm sure the Justice League animated television series is awesome and all, but I guess I was hoping for something more. So I decide to check out the "friends" section and command the Netflix elves to go crank on a different machine:



In order to find other Netflix members with similar tastes in movies.

Well, it turns out my top match (79% similar!) is someone, well, how about you just look at their profile:



*SIGH*. At least Easily_Entertained demonstrates consistency by literally rating every movies she's ever seen as 5-stars. Well, I suppose I will update my queue to include some of her recommendations, such as Dragonslayer, Spongebob Squarepants: Sea Stories, and Look Who's Talking Too.

*SIGH*

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SIDE NOTE: From WikiAnswers.com, which I now recommend should never be used for anything, especially building things like cars or space shuttles, or giant robots with saws for arms but who are only programmed for good:
Q. How many babies are born in the world daily?
A. "approximately 4 babies"
Hmm, that is unexpected but very interesting! But what about just in the US?
Q. How many people are born in the US every day?
A. "well, i would say that there are about 1 million people born each day in the US."
??!???

POSSIBLE REASONS FOR ENORMOUS DISCREPANCY:
  1. fundamental difference in definition of "baby" vs "person"
  2. improper metric or unit conversion
  3. The US is 250,000 times bigger than the world in which it is contained, possibly by projecting the bulk of its size into some other dimension, like Awesome-Dimension, or Frito-Dimension.
  4. INTERNET!

1 comment:

S.A.M. said...

that is my favorite post in a while. and it reminded me that I have to update my queue (great scrabble word) because I just turned in all my movies today. Thanks!