I've seen a 25' Baleen whale dead in a river up in Alaska and I can safety say that a dead whale is about as big of a fail as you will ever see. I might have missed the birds carrying it there, but when I saw it they were snacking on him.
No. The solution is to allow downvoting the original submissions, not only the comments.
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.
[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 am more prone to seeing that damned "I'm Sorry..." but we think you're a bot or some dick sending automated queries and now we are killing your access for 24-72 hours.
Just to update further. It requires something more than what's in the tweets and will not be done for some time. Ugh. I keep getting that block when searching.
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?
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.
Their starting point obviously isn't above their ending point, though.
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.)
You'd think for a Books fail, one might have had the whale be white. Even better if you have Ahab attached to it with a harpoon, but that might be a little grisly for an error page.
Humorous, sure, but I wonder what percentage of Google Books users will get the reference. If I didn't know about Twitter's fail whale, "Whale Fail" might seem totally random.
Just to confirm with empirical evidence, I didn't know about the "fail whale" meme until after seeing this, but I still thought Google's page was humorous and made sense.
The worst case scenario is that it makes no less sense than the original Twitter fail whale.
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".
No, it doesn’t make sense, even if you are familiar with Moby Dick. How is the whale failing? How is there any “fail” associated with the whale? The wording only makes sense if you are already familiar with the Fail Whale meme.
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.
fwiw, even the term "fail" alone is still pretty subcultural. i don't entirely agree with alanh, but they are definitely right that many of those who understand the reference are letting their understanding blind them.
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. :)
fwiw, even the term "fail" alone is still pretty subcultural. i don't entirely agree with alanh, but they are definitely right that many of those who understand the reference are letting their understanding blind them.
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 never suggested the reference was detrimental to the page, but it is a risk. proven even just by the fact that it's debatable. it is an error page; the person likely got here because they are confused in the first place. this is especially notable given the huge spectrum of Google's audience.
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.
Just curious, what age groups to do associate with? Being 20, so around teens and what not 'fail' is said an obnoxious amount. I don't think it's as subcultural as you think. (Some of these people ask how to use Twitter...)
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'm 22. it's not a generation gap and i'm aware of the virality of "fail" in general. i never suggested in what capacity it existed, just that i would consider it subcultural. even if you assume the extremity that everyone under 22 has heard "fail" to some extent- i'm quite sure they are not Google's primary audience for this product.
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
I strongly agree with this comment. Sure, all us nerds know the Fail Whale. And Twitter is sort-of mainstream, but has nowhere near the adoption of Facebook — and those mainstream users, even when seeing the fail whale, may not know it goes by that name.
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)
1. This use of fail is becoming a fairly standard colloquialism. I don't think it's too hard for the average person to conclude Moby Dick from context, since they've probably heard someone under the age of 25 use fail in a similar manner.
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.
