From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Wed 28 Jan 2004 - 01:50:43 GMT
At 07:43 AM 27/01/04 -0800, you wrote:
>Keith:
>
>Google hits on Scientology 1,280,000
>
> > add truth 72,800
> > add fraud instead 22,800
>
>so I guess by the standard below scientology is 3.5
> times more likely to be truth than fraud?
It is instructive to look at the first page or two of Google results for
"scientology truth." Seven of the first ten:
www.xenu.net/
www.rickross.com/reference/scientology/celebrities/celebrities17.html
www.holysmoke.org/cos/courage.htm
www.holysmoke.org/cos/cult-hiding-crimes.htm
www.truthaboutscientology.com/ -
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/finsbury/124/
www.lermanet.com/ -
are anti-scientology sites. "Truth" gets used in context such as
"Scientology does not tell the truth . . .," "Now the truth is allergic to
those who tell lies . . .," "Do you have the whole truth about
Scientology?" So the use of the word implies the converse of truth for
this subject. The last three:
www.notodrugs-yestolife.org/
www.scientology.org/
www.drugsalvage.org/
are scientology sites. If you know much about this cult, you are very
likely to assign a counter meaning to their use of the word.
As you can see from the above, word searches on Google, should be subjected
to bit of reality checking. To explain the methodology for presenting the
data the way I did--which I probably should have done last night . . . .
I was not surprised to find 137,000 references to memetics (I have seen
upwards of 50,000 for years). I was surprised to find 18,000 references to
mimetics. It turns out mimetics has several established meanings besides
the one proposed by Richard Dawkins. (Insulin Mimetics, X-ray Nucleic Acid
Mimetics and uses much stranger.) Taking a fast look at the first two
pages I could not find a *single* use of the word which would relate it to
memes. So I added "meme" to sort out the pages of interest. (I should
have used meme OR memes which gives 320 hits.) Having sorted one term this
way, it would be unfair to compare it to the other term without using the
same additional restriction. That's where the 21,700 to 274 or (very
roughly) 100 to 1 ratio comes from. Using meme OR memes as the restriction
term on both gives 31,400 to 320 which is even closer to 100 to
1. (Numbers are for January 27, 2004 and very subject to change.)
I suspect that competing uses of the word mimetics decreased the chances of
it being accepted.
Keith Henson
PS. (scientology "Keith Henson") in Google gives 22,700 hits. (~2%)
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