So what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

I don’t remember the exact context that this came up (was probably something along the lines of “Google can answer any question”), but yesterday we had some friends over and the question arose, so a quick google got me to this page:

The Swallow Question.

Except for linking to a very interesting article that actually tries to tackle the problem scientifically, John DuBois (the author of the above page) tackled the question more empirically by adding the question as part of the registration process for a new account on the service that he is running. Some of the responses are very amusing.

Another very interesting “article” from Style.org is the State of the Union Parsing Tool which allows one to analyze George W. Bush’s state of the union speeches in reference to specific terms – you input two terms and the parser tool analyzes and highlights the occurrence of these terms in the speeches. I thought that the following two searches are very interesting:
Security vs. Economic
Security vs. Freedom
The parser tool can also suggests other interesting words to compare.

On another note altogether, as I don’t think it warrants its own post, here’s a funny clip I recently watched (way too many times during work):

2 Responses to “So what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

  1. Eran:

    I posted that link on my blog a few weeks back. It’s one of my old links.

  2. Guss:

    I’m not as up-to-date on your blog as I’d like to be, sorry :-/

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