
The Gyllenhaal Experiment - iron0013
https://pudding.cool/2019/02/gyllenhaal/
======
cannam
Oh that was disappointing - I hadn't heard of one of them so I hit what I
thought was the "skip" button, and it took me straight to the results of all
of the questions without letting me try any of the rest.

I realise that this is because I am stupid - there is a warning, but I thought
it was just warning me I wouldn't be able to try that question again, not that
I wouldn't be able to try any of them. (It said that you wouldn't be able to
go back again, but I didn't want to go back - I wanted to go forward.) Boo.

~~~
umvi
Right click link -> Open link in incognito window

Hacky workaround, yes, but this is HN after all

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ouid
or you can just delete your site cookies. I strongly doubt that they are
fingerprinting you.

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noxToken
It's in local storage. I did the same as GP, and the data for your responses
is in local storage.

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robaato
Did some programming for analysis of the Middle English Dialect project way
back when. This was based on corpus of 320 words as they were spelt by scribes
in different parts of the UK. Often the same scribe would spell a word 3 or 4
different ways in the same document. But there were regional variations etc.
Fascinating topic. Helped to draw maps like:

[http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme_frames.html](http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme_frames.html)

[http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/?page_id=563](http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/?page_id=563)

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Pigo
>Chuck Palahniuk

I've been reading his books since I found out who wrote Fight Club in 1999. My
brain does NOT want to remember how to spell his name. It makes me feel like I
have a learning disability.

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js2
I can never spell "bureaucracy" correctly without assistance. I always have to
spell check it. Sometimes I can't even get close enough to spell check. I
can't think of any other English words I have such trouble with.

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pbhjpbhj
Can you spell bureau?

Maybe you can make a mnemonic, how are you with spelling burette?

A crazy person is using a burette with a gold (Au) end, extruding a 3D
wireframe model of a desk (bureau):

Bure(tte)+au+crazy ... and hopefully you can remember where the final "c"
goes.

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js2
I cannot spell bureau. It trips me up even typing it. Maybe this is the thread
that will have finally jammed it into my brain. I'll get back to you in a week
or so. :-)

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poopchute
I always think of Jim Carry in Bruce Almighty spelling out

B-E-A-Utiful

Surprisingly it helps with words that have that 'eau' mash of vowels.

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gbaygon
It's Jim Carrey, you just added one data point to the experiment ;)

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eternalny1
Brutal. Those were far more difficult than expected, I generally veered off
path around half-way on most of them.

Very interesting experiment, my pride notwithstanding (sp?).

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tobr
> I generally veered off path around half-way on most of them.

That's something misleading about this visualisation... It makes it look like
you got it more wrong because you have a letter wrong early in the word, even
if every letter after it is right.

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BEEdwards
I get what you're saying, but the cool path thing is unique paths not
correctness of spelling.

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tobr
Yes, and it’s a very cool way to show that, but they turned it into a game
where you want to get the spelling right.

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pvorb
Play it again and try to guess the most common erroneous spelling.

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abecedarius
Went through five celebrities before the first I recognized. Would be nice to
see how many of us can spell e.g. Dijkstra.

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phaedryx
I've probably read his name more times than the names of these celebrities.

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StavrosK
I'd never even heard of Peekaboo Street or whatever her name is before. I got
almost everyone else right, at least.

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rootusrootus
I think it's age specific. If you're in the right age group you've heard of
most of them. I got most wrong because I'd never heard of them, but Picabo
Street is just a little older than me and she was well known in the late 90s.

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StavrosK
I'm almost 40, but I guess it's because I'm Greek, so I'd never heard of her.

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rf2019
This explains a lot of misspellings on envelopes I get through the mail, and
it would be good to see this with your own name.

It must be really sad if you’re Matthew mcconaughey and two thirds of the time
your name is spelled wrongly in some way.

Still, he’s doing ok

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mikepurvis
Yeah I'm sure he finds a way to cope.

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jethro_tell
There's also a difference between randos talking about you on the Internets
and serious people spelling your name. They probably don't get it wrong on his
chair or trailer on set. It's probably spelled right on his checks and other
documents and in most all correspondence of any value. I cannot spell half my
teammates last names from memory, but I don't rely on that because it's
important communication.

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jstanley
This looks cool but I don't understand the results.

The correct path is the one highlighted in blue.

Is the most popular path the one that always follows the largest child? Or is
the top-most child the most popular one? This is unambiguous on the Britney
Spears example, but not on Zooey Deschanel, for example.

Also, I'd never heard of half of these people so had no idea how their name
should be spelt.

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danielsf
the correct path is always blue. path popularity is based on line thickness.

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jstanley
So how is vertical ordering decided? It's not lexical.

EDIT: I just looked again and it has changed. Perhaps the vertical ordering is
random?

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hughes
I don't think the vertical ordering contains information.

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wumms
Has anybody else also problems with a buggy input field?

I tried writing "Palahniuk". Here I stopped typing after the h:

PPALPPALAHPPALPPALAHAN

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schlowmo
Yes, I also had the same issue with Chrome 72 on Android. Probably saved
myself some shame though.

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curtis
It seems likely that I am not the only person who can't spell Chuck
Palahniuk's last name.

Edit: Now that I think about it, it might be more accurate to say that
_nobody_ can spell Chuck Palahniuk's last name...

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jandrese
Most people can't even pronounce it. I'm guessing the spelling is more natural
if you speak Ukrainian.

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jimbobimbo
In Ukrainian - yes, but not in English.

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jandrese
Is this one of those cases where the wage slave at Ellis Island did a
craptastic job of transliterating the name and they've been stuck with it ever
since?

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gnomewascool
It's a case of the Latin transliteration not having a "natural"/intuitive
pronunciation in English and hence a made-up pronunciation being used.[0]

I think that the transliteration itself was "correct" (assuming that the
original Ukrainian was Палагнюк).

[0] [https://chuckpalahniuk.net/author/frequently-asked-
questions...](https://chuckpalahniuk.net/author/frequently-asked-questions-
about-chuck-palahniuk#biographical-1)

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pbhjpbhj
Where did the "g" (г) go, Palagniuk seems closer (or Palagnyuk may be
better?).

I know a little Russian, perhaps this is different in Ukrainian?

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gnomewascool
The Ukrainian г is pronounced as something intermediate between English hard
"g" and "h" (ɦ in IPA)[0][1], so it's often transliterated as h.[2]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_alphabet#Letter_name...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_alphabet#Letter_names_and_pronunciation)

[1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ɦ](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ɦ)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Ukrainian#Tabl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Ukrainian#Tables_of_romanization_systems)

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sexy_seedbox
Those "Mc" vs "Mac" surnames are tough.

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fancyfish
Fun fact: "Mac" is the original Irish surname prefix meaning "son of," and
"Mc" is the Anglicized form. McDonald = Son of Donald. As is usual, Irish
names are patronymic meaning they're relating to the male's lineage. A
daughter would be "Nic" (daughter of the son of) and wife "Mhic" (wife of the
son of).

Then why so few "Nic"s and "Mhic"s? The Anglicized form isn't so particular
about gender, so females use "Mac/Mc."

The "O'" prefix as in "O'Donnell" means "descendant of," along with its female
variants.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_name)

~~~
onorton
What's funny now is that in Northern Ireland (not too sure about down south)
we tend to read "Mc" as probably Irish and "Mac" as Scottish.

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mathgenius
Where is the journalism here? Where is the story? I don't see any. "People
can't spell" isn't a story...

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Sniffnoy
I really don't like the interface here. It is way too easy to accidentally hit
the wrong button and spoil what you're doing. I had to delete my cookies for
the page in order to get around the "no going back" after I accidentally hit
the wrong button.

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lifeisstillgood
A fun dataset (how many people cannot spell using Google's text box) but a
couple of points

1\. I could not recognise my first picture so had to use the speech tab -
which I swear sounds like Mark McGuires (with the S). So I add the extra S and
of course get it "wrong".

I know I am being picky but ...

Secondly, how much of this dataset is Google being too good at correcting our
spelling - I know I regularly send google bad spellings simply because my
thumbs cannot be bothered to rewind on a small phone when google is 99% likely
to show me what I meant anyway.

Is there a comparison between mobile spelling percentage and desktop /
keyboard spelling percentages - I suspect we all spell better on a keyboard
than a phone ?

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danielsf
This is a live dataset. All the examples except for Britney Spears are using
user-submitted answers.

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lifeisstillgood
oh I assumed they had google data

OK so still same question applies - do we spell differently on mobiles vs
keyboards - is spelling an intellectual thing or a cannot be bothered thing?

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moftz
I misspell more words on a mobile device than a real keyboard. I used to use
IRC over an ssh terminal and would occasionally connect using my phone when I
was out of the house. The app wouldn't do autocorrect for anything typed into
the terminal so my spelling was atrocious due to hitting the wrong buttons
sometimes. At home using a real keyboard, I had a much easier time. I still
spelled words wrong but those were words that I just don't know how to spell.

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ccvannorman
How is Bernardent Cufnersnatch not on this list?!

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ekun
Well, as fun as it is to mess up benadryl cucumber's name it's very easy to
spell correctly.

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1_player
I'm partial to Wimbledon Tennismatch.

So far from the real thing, yet everybody gets it.

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justtopost
Who are these people? How am I supposed to spell random persons names if I
have to google who they are to begin with?

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ATsch
Whatever this author has done to the input field has really screwed it up on
my phone. I type "Kae" and it just ends up as "KaekaeKae", any attempts to hit
backspace just duplicate the input text again and again.

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kbutler
Names are probably the least-interesting thing to study with respect to
spelling, because they are completely arbitrary and there is so much variation
even in identical-sounding names.

How many variants can you find for "Mikayla"?

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Xophmeister
Percentages would be more illustrative than absolute values, I feel. It looks
like the visualisation partially accounts for relative proportion, with the
width of the branches, but it's not a linear scale.

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philipodonnell
Any idea what the visualization package is here that is creating those charts?

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catacombs
More than likely D3.js, which is a popular library used in many web-based data
visualizations.

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Raphmedia
D3.js is indeed in the page's source.

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pkamb
I'd love a Mac app or keyboard shortcut that simply corrected the nearest "red
squiggly line" misspelled word in your current textbox.

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okbake
The visualizations here are great. I really like how it represents the
different branches of a tree structure

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kazinator
An alarmingly frequent misspelling is "Ghandi" instead of "Gandhi".

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blueline
why is that alarming?

"i know there's an h in the name, but i forget where it goes..." => Ghandi
seems like an extremely understandable mistake for an english speaker

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Zigurd
0% of Starbucks cups end up with a correct spelling of "Zigurd."

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mirimir
The site doesn't work in Firefox or Midori.

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Splines
I realize this is probably not helpful for you, but it works on my machine. FF
65.0.1 on Win10.

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mirimir
Thanks. I have Firefox 60.3.0esr (64-bit) in Debian jessie. So maybe it's the
age, or that I block WebGL. Or maybe spoofing referrer. Or blocking local
storage. Or something else about NoScript.

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vharish
I blame English for this :D

