"Whale Fail" - Google Books' Error Page
books.google.com
books.google.com
Choose wisely.
You reach for the moust but it is still dark. You pick up something slightly squishy, it stings you, then eats you.
You are dead, Your score: 6/31337.
Would you like to play again? (Y/N)
[edit: An idea which I wouldn't know about if I hadn't seen it here. For me, HN still is good enough to spend time with. But it has grown less stringent about humor and links to images, which I think reduces S/N.]
I see really crappy submissions occasionally. I just don't want them to show and I'd like their authors to refine their submitting strategy, so I just want to downvote. And the argument that I can upvote other stories instead is flawed - it'd require me to be here all the time, which is an evil requirement.
Citations == Upvotes, Abstract == TLDR, and content is far, far more superior.
http://twitter.com/#!/lizthegrey/status/11944278339100672 http://twitter.com/#!/lizthegrey/status/11950637621186560
The thing that's bothering me about the fail whale -- all the strings that hold the whale are curved. Is this physically possible? (Assuming the birds can hold the whale in the air). Shouldn't at least one of the strings be a straight line?
mansr is right, I've been looking at this all wrong because I assumed the weight of the strings was small compared to the weight of the whale. But if the strings are dense they will curve under their own weight. So we're not looking at a super-light whale, we're looking a regular whale supported by super-heavy strings.
(Where do you get strings so dense that the mass of a short stretch is comparable to the mass of a whale? Why, the same place you get those goddamn birds, of course.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary
Even when one of the ends is weighted down rather than fixed, I think it's still going to want to fall into a catenary curve, because that curve minimizes the potential energy of the string itself, and there is some equilibrium between the lower potential energy of the string and the higher potential energy of the object. How far the curvature departs from a straight line is probably a function of the ratio of mass between the lifted object and the string itself. With a whale and some yarn, it's going to asymptotically close to a straight line, but still slightly curved. However, fail whales are apparently light enough to be carried by a handful of birds, so the weight is probably comparable to the string itself.
Edit: Thanks for pointing out the color of the whale. That does make more sense. But still, I object to the unprofessional and derivative wording. Having any sort of whale on an error page is homage enough, without beating anyone over the head with it or confusing people. “We’re having trouble locating that <del>whale</del> <ins>book</ins>” would make more sense, IMO.
"Not another fricking black whale", he's saying. "Whale fail!"
this type of blindness is rabidly (albeit understandably) common among technology companies in general. given that that Google reaches all types of users and an error page is meant to inform, i'm not sure the reference is worth the risk.
that all said, i personally find the reference obvious, thus boring. but that's just my opinion. :)
Sure, but it's not necessary to fully understand the page in order to get the message. An error occurred. Why is there a whale involved? Who cares?
The only people I can imagine who might get confused are people who encounter this while trying to read Moby Dick.
i don't feel strongly either way on the execution. however, i do feel strongly that it would be negligent for the deciding party to not at least recognize that it is a risk.
Yes, it's an error page, and it says it is "having trouble finding the page". I don't get the confusion that could cause.
If an obvious reference is boring, why did you complain about the use of fail which is subcultural as you put it?
i do realize this is not an acute analogy, but allow me to close with a sobering reminder of the truth. google asks: "what is a browser?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ
That was a completely out-of-context picture which made no sense, but nobody complained about it. Likewise, anyone confronted with a google books fail whale (which, incidentally, should happen a lot less often than the twitter fail whale, because google's infrastructure doesn't suck) without the preceding context of the twitter fail whale will understand what the page means just as much as they'd understand "404 not found".
Now while I enjoy the artwork here, and it’s clever, this error page strikes me as
1. Overly nerd-centric / in-joke (Edit: I am referring to the Twitter reference, not the use of the word “fail” here)
2. Unprofessional (the word “fail” used as a noun)
3. Derivative.
2. Google is renowned and even loved for their "unprofessional" home page logos. This is no different, and there's nothing wrong with a bit of whimsy.
3. As is all art.
The home page doodles are interesting and unconventional, but not unprofessional.
This bastardization of English is not interesting, only unconventional in educated company, and certainly unprofessional.
But seriously, this is how language evolves.
No harm done.