Mandelaed: What if it never appeared on TV in Flash Gordon in the 21st or Buck Rogers in the 25th century?

Has metal bucket head man “Mandelaed” me?

What if metal bucket head man, as I like to think of him, never actually appeared in the 25th century Buck Rogers black and white TV series in 1950 or 1951, or in 1954 or 1955 in an episode of Flash Gordon from the 21st century?

What if … none of it was real, or at least that there was no metal bucket head man (it’s hard to describe the appearance of the character exactly, but over his head, if he had one, or in lieu of one if he didn’t, appeared to be something reminiscent of one of those upside down old silver metal wash pails or buckets, yet the rest of him looked more humanoid than like a robot, although he didn’t speak in either case), but I remembered him from my childhood as real?

Well, never fear, the explanation may simply be that I was mandelaed and am displaying a classic case of the “Mandela Effect,” as it is called, although in my case it may or may not be a case of being privately mandelaed, rather than the collective misremembering of common events the phenomenon is usually identified with.

“This form of collective misremembering of common events or details first emerged in 2010, when countless people on the internet falsely remembered Nelson Mandela was dead,” notes Neil Dagnall, reader in applied cognitive psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, in a Feb. 12 piece in The Conversation, based in Toronto. “It was widely believed he had died in prison during the 1980s. In reality, Mandela was actually freed in 1990 and passed away in 2013 – despite some people’s claims they remember clips of his funeral on TV.”

Paranormal consultant Fiona Broome, discussing the possibility of alternate memories and alternate realities, was one of the two people who coined the phrase “Mandela Effect” during a conversation in Dragon Con‘s “green room” in late 2009 to explain this collective misremembering, and then “other examples started popping up all over the internet,” Dagnall says. “For instance, it was wrongly recalled that C-3PO from Star Wars was gold, actually one of his legs is silver. Likewise, people often wrongly believe that the Queen in Snow White says, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall.’ The correct phrase is “magic mirror on the wall.”

In an Oct. 13, 2016 article, BuzzFeed staff writer Christopher Hudspeth, lists 20 examples of the Mandela Effect, ranging from the common misspelling of Oscar Mayer, the famous brand of hot dogs and lunch meat, as Oscar Meyer, to the Monopoly board game mascot, Rich Uncle Pennybags, having a monocle, when he doesn’t.

In a similar vein, as I wrote here in a March 25, 2015 post headlined “If there was a biblical equivalent to a mondegreen, it might well be the famous 45th verse from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/if-there-was-a-biblical-equivalent-to-a-mondegreen-it-might-well-be-the-famous-45th-verse-from-the-fifth-chapter-of-the-gospel-of-st-matthew/) when you “mishear the lyrics to a song it is called a mondegreen, which is a sort of aural malapropism. Instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word. The word mondegreen is generally used for misheard song lyrics, although technically it can apply to any speech. A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning.” Hudspeth cites the example of “We Are the Champions” by Queen where “many of those familiar with the song remember the final lyrics being ‘No time for losers, ’cause we are the champions … of the world!’ Guess what? There is no ‘of the world!’ The song just ends, and it’s driving people crazy because they feel 100% sure that they’ve heard otherwise in the past.”

Broome explains the Mandela Effect s differences arising from movement between parallel realities (the multiverse). This is based on the theory that within each universe alternative versions of events and objects exist.

“Broome also draws comparisons between existence and the holodeck of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, writes Dagnall. “The holodeck was a virtual reality system, which created recreational experiences. By her explanation, memory errors are software glitches. This is explained as being similar to the film The Matrix.”

Broome has described the Mandela Effect this way: “The ‘Mandela Effect’ is what happens when someone has a clear, personal memory of something that never happened in this reality.

“Many people – mostly total strangers – seem to remember several of the exact same events with the exact same details. However, those memories are different from what’s in history books, newspaper archives, and so on.”

Other theories propose that the Mandela Effect is evidence of  changes in history caused by time travellers.

The X-Files, appropriately enough, had a fine real-time nod to fake news and the Trumpocalypse, while at the same time staying campy and conspiratorially self-referential in its treatment of the Mandela Effect this year in season 11, episode four, “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” which aired Jan. 24. Writes Brian Tallerico on Vulture, the culture and entertainment site from New York magazine: “We’re introduced to the Mandela effect through the story of Reggie Something, played by Brian Huskey. We meet him in full Deep Throat mode, chewing sunflower seeds in a parking garage, having a clandestine meeting with Mulder. He knows he’s going to seem crazy, so he gives Mulder a very personal example of the Mandela effect, revealing to him that his favorite episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Lost Martian,” doesn’t really exist. Of course, we know it doesn’t, but Mulder is convinced that he saw it when he was a kid. He rummages through his belongings to find it, leading to the great line when Scully suggests it might be a different series: “Confuse The Twilight Zone with The Outer Limits?! Do you even KNOW ME?!?!”

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Google Search is a writer’s friend: Primo spell checker

For years now I’ve used Google Search as my go-to-spell checker on the internet for words that stump Microsoft Word’s spell checker (which is unfortunately a pretty low bar … “no spelling suggestions” and red underlined words are a pretty common occurrence. I may get one yet writing this sentence).

A spell checker is an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone, capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, e-mail client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.

“The spell checker scans the text and extracts the words contained in it, comparing each word with a known list of correctly spelled words (i.e. a dictionary). This might contain just a list of words, or it might also contain additional information, such as hyphenation points or lexical and grammatical attributes,” Wikipedia tells me.

“An additional step is a language-dependent algorithm for handling morphology. Even for a lightly inflected language like English, the spell-checker will need to consider different forms of the same word, such as plurals, verbal forms, contractions, and possessives. For many other languages, such as those featuring agglutination and more complex declension and conjugation, this part of the process is more complicated.”

Most of the time I do know how to spell the word triggering the red alert, but even my largely two-index fingers typing has a tendency to overrun my typing on the page when I am composing something quickly in my head, as I write (err … type), and sometimes it is just as fast, when it is more than one word, to copy-and-paste the sentence into Google Search rather than to individually correct several suspect words. Sometimes, of course, I correct the word in Word just to make sure I really do remember how to spell it. Sort of like doing math in your head, or at least on paper with a pen or pencil, rather than using a calculator. We pretty much all figure we should be able to do those things manually; we just don’t want to overdo it.

This got me thinking the other day, wondering why Google Search is so much better at correcting my spelling in sentences, almost as an afterthought, while it completes a search that may or may not be additionally helpful in and of itself. Google Search will often finish a sentence correctly for me, even if I only paste or type a part of the sentence into the search box or bar.

My first hunch was that it had something to do with the vast amount of data Google Search processes with over three billion searches a day, and developing algorithms and other proprietary tools based on that.

My second hunch was that if I was pondering this other people have thought about it, researched it, and likely written about it before me.

My intuition for both hunches turned out to be correct.

Intuition, in fact, is what Google Search is all about. What makes it intuitive? Context. Context rules.

John Breeden II, the Washington, D.C. chief executive officer of Tech Writers Bureau, who formerly was the laboratory director and senior technology analyst for Government Computer News (GCN), where he reviewed thousands of products aimed at the U.S. federal government – everything from notebooks to high-end servers – and at the same time decoded highly technical topics for broad audiences, wrote about the topic in an Nov. 18, 2011 article for GCN.

“My biggest problem with Word is that there are some words that simply trip it up,” Breeden wrote. “When writing about temperature for our many rugged reviews, I always put ‘Farenheight,’ which Word thinks should be changed to ‘Fare height.’ That doesn’t help at all.

“However, when the same misspelled word is pasted into Google, it says, ‘showing results for Fahrenheit instead.’ There are quite a few other words that confuse Word but not Google. They are not difficult to find.

“I have to wonder why Google is so smart when it comes to figuring out what word a user wants to use. My guess is that the database Google is pulling from is so massive that it’s probably seen a lot of the same basic spelling mistakes. There are probably a lot of people who have wanted to search for Fahrenheit but typed in ‘Farenheight’ instead. Nice to know that I’ve got company.

“You would think it would be simple for word processors to use the same type of technology to improve their accuracy, but I suppose that would involve capturing data from their users and then making the connections between common mistakes and the accurate spelling.

“I thought that is what spell check was supposed to do, but instead I think it just matches the misspelling with words that are somewhat close to what you’ve typed. And Google obviously goes beyond that to associate common mistakes with actual words.”

An anonymous poster at Quora, a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, wrote on Sept. 1, 2012 in response to the question, “How is google so good at correcting spelling mistakes in searches?”:

“Google (search engines in general) has clusters processing tons (TB’s) query logs, which try to learn the transformation from original misspelled sentence to the corrected one. These transformation schemes are fed into the front end servers which serve the auto completion (and/or corrections to queries). “Also these servers have lot more processing power and memory and disk space of course will not be an issue at all (for the learned transformations). “Also since Google crawls the entire web regularly it will learn new words and suggest corrections Word can’t do till next release.”

Quora also aggregates questions and answers to topics.

“Desktop software usually have tight constraints on processing power, memory or disk space they could use to run compared to that of server based applications and usually are expected to keep the internet usage to a minimum (at least for MS Word.) “They use static resources (dictionary that might only be current at the time of launch) and can’t employ complex algorithms due to the above said restrictions and hence employ heuristic algorithms which may not [be] very predictive of the correct word.”

Cosmin Negruseri, vice-president of engineering at Addepar, an investment management technology company, formerly worked at Google (both companies are based in Mountain View in Santa Clara County, California) as an engineer, working on ads, search and Google Code Jam, an international programming competition hosted and administered by Google, replied the same day, writing: “The main insight in modern spell correctors is using context. For example New Yorp is a misspelling of New York with a high probability.”

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