[Buddha-l] Religious violence, Buddhist violence and spelling

[Dan Lusthaus]

Alex & Richard,

Thanks for the explanation of hit-count. I thought perhaps Alex had wind of 
a more precise device or function than the number that appears during a 
regular google search. As Richard noted, that is pretty useless if you've 
entered more than one word since it will include anything that has any of 
the words, not the combo, and even on a page that contains all the words 
they may not occur anywhere within proximity of each other. So the only 
thing that count is useful for is how many webpages one would have to wade 
through before maybe finding the nugget one is looking for (google's 
algorithms are getting better, so the nugget may appear in the initial 30 or 
so hits).

For single terms that hit count it more useful (the word should appear 
somewhere on the page, though that is not always the case -- on pages where 
the search term does appear one possibility is that the webpage designer hid 
that word, and likely others, in invisible text that google's webcrawler 
will nonetheless detect, all for the devious purpose of getting you to enter 
their site and to get listed high-up in the google hit hierarchy.

As Alex noted, misspellings (particularly of celebrities' names) are quite 
common on the net, so one can get many hits even when mistyping or 
misspelling a celebrity search. That's actually a useful feature when 
searching for someone/something that one is not exactly sure how to spell.

But to settle whether a word like Nietzschian is a word in legitimate usage, 
one would actually have to visit some of the sites listing it to see whether 
these are posted by reputable people or authoritative sources. In this case 
many thousands of them are. A panini-sandwich stickler might still insist 
that they are all wrong, this whole generation is going to hell in a 
hand-basket, and straw men are useful distractions when one's position is 
shaky, but since the ruling rubric was the Safire criterion of usage, the 
quantity as well as quality of the hits count as definitive evidence.

That google frequently suggest an alternate spelling, even when one has 
properly entered a search term, is another helpful feature at times, but 
carries no weight.

Just to remind us where this digression came from, I suggested that Brian 
Victoria and possibly Michael Jerryson, when measured by a nietzschean (or 
should the N be capitalized?) rubric -- viz. profound disappointment 
stemming from the failure of one's ideals to live up to one's expectations, 
to be exposed as false or hollow, leads to nihilism -- are commendable 
examples of cases where, instead of falling into despair or negativistic 
nabbobing, they became affirmative of the ideal in a new way; instead of 
nihilists, they became ja-sagenders ("Yes" Sayers). (or should Ja-sagender 
be capitalized? They capitalize everything [a.k.a. nouns] in German, don't 
they?). I find that admirable.

Dan

P.S. The spellchecker in Outlook Express recognizes neither Nietzschean nor 
Nietzchian, and suggests just plain ole Nietzsche as a replacement.

Also, Richard mentioned that I had attempted to disable some google tracking 
functions, and others suggested additional ways to that. I'm unhappy to 
report that the google continues to track, despite my having disabled 
everything I could get my hands on, and that the only noticeable consequence 
is that YouTube won't work (google bought them up, and won't give the 
content unless they are allowed to read your harddrive and track your 
whereabouts while you watch the clips). Maybe if we hack them in Chinese 
they will leave our computers?