November 23, 2006

If you plot all movies by their number-of-votes on IMDb and their rating on IMDb, you get the chart below. Movies with more votes usually have a higher rating. I was interested two things: Which are the unpopular, but good (highly-rated), movies? Which are the popular, but lousy, movies? The answer to the first question is: there are no unpopular good movies. The cluster of dots on the top-left (in red) are not movies – they’re TV shows (Band of Brothers, Pride and Prejudice, Arrested Development). ...

If you create a file in Windows Notepad with the string “bush hid the facts”, save it and reopen it, it shows you boxes. Same with “this app can break”. Here’s why. It has nothing to do with George Bush or Microsoft. It’s just that these strings are in ASCII, but they also constitute valid Unicode strings, and Notepad guesses (wrongly) that they are in fact Chinese Unicode files.