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Google, ever helpful
Jan. 29th, 2009 08:13 pmI've been working all day on the section of Bogus Science that deals with people's attempts over the centuries to build perpetual motion machines. After hours of this I've reached the stage where I'm typing these words with, like, my eyeballs.
Sir William Congreve, of Congreve's Rocket fame, devised one of these machines and was so absolutely stonkingly sure it'd work that, though he took out a patent for it, he never actually tried to build it. I don't blame him. Even leaving aside all the usual reasons for not spending money and effort trying to build a prototype of that wizard-wheeze perpetual motion machine your mind conjured up in the bath, just looking at the sketches for this one drives home to you that it won't do the business. Even in dreams it's not going to do anything but sit there transfixing you with a mute glare of deep loathing and accusation, like a cat whose tail you recently trod on.
The device depends for its functioning (or, in fact, nonfunctioning) on the phenomenon of capillary lift, that surface-tension effect whereby water gets from the soil up to the tops of trees. I've been told time and time again that, for snotty scientific reasons I cannot currently recall, "capillary lift" is not the proper term for this effect, and that there's a posh, kudos-laden term I should use for it instead -- indeed, I have often used this very term, feeling all proud and shiny as I do so in the knowledge that I'm thereby bolstering my somewhat spurious scientific street cred. But it's not the instinctive term for me to use: that's "capillary lift", which was what it was called when I first came across the concept at the age of perhaps 7 in the Boys' Bumper Book of Knowledge and Illustrated Encyclopedic World Almanac and was so enthralled by the gravity-defying aspect of it all that I momentarily forgot to suck my thumb.
So can I remember the posh term after hours of flogging out what pass for my brains as I try to comprehend a stack of different knuckleheaded (not always the adjective I have been using for them) perpetual motion machines? In particular, can I do so while I've been trying to explain to readers the basics of Congreve's device, which has to be the most obtuse of the lot?
No, I cannot.
Are my dictionaries any help?
No. In fact, I'm quite astonished how useless they are in this respect. Naughty lexicographers should get smacked.
So I turn to trusty Google.
A search for just "capillary lift" reveals that lots and lots of other people cannot, like me, remember the posh term -- or, if they can, have more guts than I have and just use the popular version anyway.
But I am cunning -- a latter-day Baldrick, or at least Congreve.
I put a new search phrase into Google: "otherwise known as capillary lift".
This turns up -- tarantara!
Well, nothing. However, Google is so flipping helpful it brings tears to your eyes. Instead of just saying "Try something else, loser", Google does the search for me as if I hadn't used the quote marks as indication I wanted this exact wording, none other. It gives me
Results for otherwise known as capillary lift (without quotes):
First up with this new, improved, Google-dictated search is this:
Micro fat augmentation of the butt, otherwise known as the Brazilian butt lift, is performed in our outpatient facility under general anesthesia.
It is at moments like this that you realize you are overdue to have your supper and watch some mindless crap on television, preferably with babes in it, for half an hour before getting back to bloody Congreve . . .
