Haha! This comment on reddit is totally awesome. It was epic enough to spawn a wiki dedicated to exploring Cuil Theory in greater depth. The short of things is this: Cuil is a search engine that does not search things; instead, it is a simulation of search upon an abstraction of things.

When Cuil indexes a site, it actually indexes the things that the site is related to, instead of indexing the site. When you search the Cuil index, it does not search for your term, but instead searches for terms that are derived from your term; those terms are compared to the derived representations of the sites in the Cuil index.

The net result is an amazingly bizarre, disjointed and tenuous grasp on reality, like a severely advanced case of semantic dementia. Cuil theory attempts to generalize this system of understanding to apply in other situations than web search. The seminal work on Cuil Theory has been copied, below.

RTFA: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7da5i/p…

Can we make that a unit of measurement?

One Cuil = One level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation.

Example: You ask me for a Hamburger.

1 Cuil: if you asked me for a hamburger, and I gave you a raccoon.

2 Cuils: If you asked me for a hamburger, but it turns out I don’t really exist. Where I was originally standing, a picture of a hamburger rests on the ground.

3 Cuils: You awake as a hamburger. You start screaming only to have special sauce fly from your lips. The world is in sepia.

4 Cuils: Why are we speaking German? A mime cries softly as he cradles a young cow. Your grandfather stares at you as the cow falls apart into patties. You look down only to see me with pickles for eyes, I am singing the song that gives birth to the universe.

And so on.

edit: other Cuil levels added for completeness.

5 Cuils: You ask for a hamburger, I give you a hamburger. You raise it to your lips and take a bite. Your eye twitches involuntarily. Across the street a father of three falls down the stairs. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. I give you a hamburger. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. You cannot swallow. There are children at the top of the stairs. A pickle shifts uneasily under the bun. I give you a hamburger. You look at my face, and I am pleading with you. The children are crying now. You raise the hamburger to your lips, tears stream down your face as you take a bite. I give you a hamburger. You are on your knees. You plead with me to go across the street. I hear only children’s laughter. I give you a hamburger. You are screaming as you fall down the stairs. I am your child. You cannot see anything. You take a bite of the hamburger. The concrete rushes up to meet you. You awake with a start in your own bed. Your eye twitches involuntarily. I give you a hamburger. As you kill me, I do not make a sound. I give you a hamburger.

6 Cuils: You ask me for a hamburger. My attempt to reciprocate is cut brutally short as my body experiences a sudden lack of electrons. Across a variety of hidden dimensions you are dismayed. John Lennon hands me an apple, but it slips through my fingers. I am reborn as an ocelot. You disapprove. A crack echoes through the universe in defiance of conventional physics as cosmological background noise shifts from randomness to a perfect A Flat. Children everywhere stop what they are doing and hum along in perfect pitch with the background radiation. Birds fall from the sky as the sun engulfs the earth. You hesitate momentarily before allowing yourself to assume the locus of all knowledge. Entropy crumbles as you peruse the information contained within the universe. A small library in Phoenix ceases to exist. You stumble under the weight of everythingness, Your mouth opens up to cry out, and collapses around your body before blinking you out of the spatial plane. You exist only within the fourth dimension. The fountainhead of all knowledge rolls along the ground and collides with a small dog. My head tastes sideways as spacetime is reestablished, you blink back into the corporeal world disoriented, only for me to hand you a hamburger as my body collapses under the strain of reconstitution. The universe has reasserted itself. A particular small dog is fed steak for the rest of its natural life. You die in a freak accident moments later, and you soul works at the returns desk for the Phoenix library. You disapprove. Your disapproval sends ripples through the inter-dimensional void between life and death. A small child begins to cry as he walks toward the stairway where his father stands.

RTFA: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-…

The government of Iceland today became the first to be effectively brought down by the credit crunch.

After several nights of rioting over the financial crisis, Prime Minister Geir Haarde, surrendered to increasing pressure and called a general election for May.

A poll would not normally be held until 2011.

Haarde also revealed that he had been diagnosed with a malignant tumour of the oesophagus and would not seek re-election.

‘I have decided not to seek re-election as leader of the Independence Party at its upcoming national congress,’ he told a news conference.

The global financial crisis hit Iceland, which has a population 320,000, in October, triggering a collapse in its currency and financial system under the weight of billions of dollars of foreign debts incurred by its banks

I love the sound of “first to be brought down…” That sort of anthropomorphic language nearly establishes the “credit crunch” as a sovereign and sentient being, just as much as it suggests that other governments might be toppled by risky financial practices. Fortunately, in a country so small, it should be a relatively simple task to audit the financial transactions and speculation that led up to this situation, right? After all, this “credit crunch” is as much the actions of people as it is the current willingness of people to lend to one another. In other words, it’s all people doing these things, not some strange non-human third-party.

RTFA: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northame…

Natalie Dylan, 22, claims her offer of a one-night stand has persuaded 10,000 men to bid for sex with her.

Last September, when her auction came to light, she had received bids up to £162,000 ($243,000) but since then interest in her has rocketed.

The student who has a degree in Women’s Studies insisted she was not demeaning herself.

Miss Dylan, from San Diego, California, USA, said she was persuaded to offer herself to the highest bidder after her sister Avia, 23, paid for her own degree after working as a prostitute for three weeks.

To get a better sense of this story, I highly recommend listening to a radio interview she recently conducted. The audio of this particularly irritating radio episode, hosted by Laura Ingraham, is available from Hot Air. Hot Air’s Allahpundit says:

I’m tempted to call it comedy gold except that there’s no punchline. It’s just 15 minutes of Ingraham trying to shame this woman into regret. And failing utterly.

I have to agree that this verges on comic gold, simply as a result of Ingraham’s irrelevance and bankrupcty, which provide absolutely no traction against Dylan’s marginally rational argument. I take that back: Dylan is actually quite rational, but because she comes across with greater honesty and sincerity, it provides for an incongruous comparison with Ingraham’s attack vector. The radio segment takes the format of an interview, but is actually a thinly veiled judgment carnival, attempting to heap shame on the basis of a completely relative, entirely unarticulated framework.

In case you aren’t hip to the Catholic Radio circuit, Ingraham has a allegedly-sizable following. From Wikipedia:

Laura Anne Ingraham (born June 19, 1964) is an American radio host, author, and political commentator. Her nationally-syndicated talk show, The Laura Ingraham Show, airs throughout the United States on Talk Radio Network. According to Talkers’ Magazine, The Laura Ingraham Show is tied for fifth among most-listened to talk shows, with an average 5.5 million weekly listeners.[1]

…continuing…

Ingraham launched The Laura Ingraham Show in April 2001, which is heard on 306 stations and on XM Satellite Radio. The show was originally syndicated by Infinity’s (now CBS’) Westwood One, but is now syndicated by Talk Radio Network. Ingraham is also the official guest host of The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel and a weekly contributor with her segment “The Ingraham Angle.”[3] Laura anchored a three week show in June 2008 called “Just In with Laura Ingraham”.[4][5]

As of 2008, Laura Ingraham is rated as the number six radio show host in America by Talkers Magazine. She was as high as number five in the past according to the same publication. [6]

Just a note: “Talk Radio Network” is biased towards so-called “conservative” topics, which is secret code for we’re fascist, and we want to enslave you.

On a separate note, what’s a good term for “moralizing” when the framework you’re pushing is, in fact, morally bankrupt? The Germans would just slam two oxymoronic words together, a la “schadenfreude,” but we Americans are more of the Orwellian persuasion, tending towards doublespeak. With that in mind, any suggestions?

UPDATE 2009-01-16

Here’s the whorehouse where Dylan is running the auction:

http://www.bunnyranch.com/bunnybabes/bunnybabes_NOPQR.php

She’s the first “bunny” on the page.

RTFA: http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE50…

A strong earthquake struck Costa Rica on Thursday, killing at least one child and injuring several people as it damaged buildings in the capital and shook nearby volcanoes.

The quake of magnitude 6.1 triggered landslides in rural areas and damaged a highway near a national volcano park.

Costa Rican media said two children selling candies to tourists on the Poas volcano were buried in a landslide on a volcano and at least one was dead. Several other people were reported hurt in a village northwest of San Jose.

“I was very frightened. First I got underneath an arch support and then, when it calmed down, I got out of the house,” said lawyer Michael Henreichs, 35, in San Jose.

The quake’s epicenter was 20 miles from San Jose at a depth of 21.7 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey said, and caused shaking for some 40 seconds.

Pieces of ceiling fell off homes in the capital and a group of tourists was reportedly stranded on a damaged road.

Local television showed buildings with shattered windows and damaged walls, but emergency services officials had no reports of serious injuries or deaths.

Earthquakes above magnitude 6 on the Richter scale can cause widespread damage in populated areas. Thursday’s quake was initially measured at 6.2.

We’ll keep an eye on the news, fumf!