Tag: girl

Leaf the Red Ones

After returning home today, I hopped out of the car and saw our next door neighbor’s little girl raking leaves. Although the small child-sized rake still towered over her by a good foot, she was doing her best at the apron of the tree. Nearby was a small colorful pile.

“Make sure you only do the red ones.” I pointed at our tree, which was a solid bright orange. It was also the the only color of leaves scattered over our unraked lawn.

She looked up at her red sugar maple, which was littered in bright red and orange leaves, down at her pile, and pushed the rake away, “Why didn’t someone tell me that? I’ve been working all day!”

I quickly went inside. Mission accomplished.

Remember those split-books?

After ranking over 10,000 items in Amazon, I’m seeing interesting stuff from time to time. However, none as amusing as this.

A while ago, I thought it might be fun to conduct an experiment and rank anything and everything that Amazon showed me. In fact, the rank wasn’t necessarily even important, I just wanted to see what would happen as recommendation after recommendation was ticked off. Would Amazon’s suggestions get better? Would it run out of suggestions? Would it result in an overflow message?

Well, I ranked over 10,000 items over the course of several months, ranging from computer books to perfume. What I found was that in the short term you could get Amazon to run out of things to recommend you. In the longer term, it got a little better recommending things, though the categories get broader, and if you stumble into a new kind of category, it leaps at the chance to have options again to show you. And, finally, nothing spectacular happened numerically when I crossed five digits.

That said, every so often, Amazon makes some amusing recommendations choices. However, this time it was the presentation that was amusing unto itself that I took a snapshot.

Know those split-books you had as a kid, where the page was divided? You’d get half an animal on top, and half an animal on the bottom. Allowing you to make a giraf-o-potamous, an elepha-gator, or a kanga-mander.

Amazon selected two products and presented them split-book fashion. Order, it turned out, was important:

Amazon Split-Book

It’s the top of a woman from 2002, and the bottom of another from 2007, put together it looks like one woman standing behind two cut outs on the product recommendation page. I couldn’t help but give each half five stars for creativity.