Monday, November 19, 2007

never trust a widget

Level of education required to read

PP:


cash advance




TAR ART RAT:

cash advance



According to critics rant

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I strongly take offense
--smb.
This is enough reason never to go to grad school.

Anonymous said...

Also, my facebook only scored high school. Who are these people making these crazy decisions???
I am in college!
--smb

Anonymous said...

Also, my facebook only scored high school. Who are these people making these crazy decisions???
I am in college!
--smb

Mithridates said...

Mine received an elementary school rating as well. I guess kids are translating Baudelaire and reading Renaissance hunting manuals in elementary school these days.

"Post-Google" by TAR ART RAT said...

WhhhhhAAAAAAHHAAAAAAAAAAAA, ok, only 65% of my posts are elementary-level, and it is true- most of my entries are written in a hurried half-awake state...
whao, but that is really. hm, bunk. I feel much worse for poor mithridates getting that rating, though...

Helen DeWitt said...

My hypothesis is that the algorithm(s) are better at picking up posts with long passages in foreign languages, for instance, than at identifying intellectual sophistication. I am often too lazy to translate some passage that struck my fancy, so I just throw it right into the blog leaving the reader to sink or swim (take that, you puny little kids, as a Marine once told us at a Methodist Bible Camp in the Andes).

This is not exactly surprising, it's just funny - TAR ART RAT is a very sophisticated blog, it's entirely predictable that an algorithm should blunder about in the face of its intellectual jouissance, a little robot trundling cluelessly through MOMA.

What's interesting is that they show a strange indifference to the sort of thing that divides the PG from the R and the X. TAR ART RAT and Mith both use much more of what my grandmother used to call "colorful language" - a child whose elementary education has included the 'cocksucker' in its vocabulary lessons will be absolutely FINE.

As I say, never trust a widget.