Friday 9 December 2011

just google it

So it happened, I gave the talk on Information Technology to a group of intellectuals in Santander and one of the points I made was that now-a-days people use search engines as an extension of their memories. I had a picture of a young man with a laptop in his hands to show how one can be talking to friends and at the same time using the computer to help with his memory. I mentioned someone I know who could easily have been the young man in the picture.
And I did something along these lines myself the other day. I was reading my e-book, a Kindle from Amazon, and in one of the pauses a random picture appeared on the screen, which was obviously a page from an old book, with some text which was difficult to read and sounded like latin. It went something like:
Izbriu grit cratuerbum guerbumerat abudomgos
It was an intriguing image and I decided it was worth spending a few minutes looking for what this might be.
So I googled it
A few entries in the list that appeared as a result showed that this same intrigue had attracted other users of the Kindle. No body had come up with a satisfactory answer. One responder had suggested that the text may well be a 'Lorem Ipsum'. This was beginning to sound like a mystery..what was this Lorem Ipsum?
Next search showed that Lorem Ipsum was randomly generated placeholder text that publishers often use to display possible fonts and use as examples.
Not satisfied with this I looked further down the list and found a blog on which someone suggested that they had found the same image on a page in an old book of Gospels and described it as follows 

'This is confirmed as a page of Lindisfarne's Gospels: It's on page 30 of the British Library's online edition of this book'

What is confusing is that the text does not appear to mean anything in Latin! Its obviously nonsense text which is what Lorem Ipsum is supposed to be.

Now this made a lot more sense and I could go back to worrying about more normal things!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, it is the beginning of the gospel of John, "In principio erat Verbum & Verbum erat apud D[eu]m & D[eu]s...", which translates to "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and God...".

This emphasis on "the Word" maintains the literary theme consistent through all the Kindle screensavers.

LA Hilden said...

I'm glad you looked into it. I was curious too, so I googled it. Thanks.

LA Hilden

LA Hilden said...

I'm glad you looked into it. I was curious too, so I googled it. Thanks.

LA Hilden