Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Lorem Ipsum

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedians/podcasters Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll ('Some More News' YouTube channel, 'Even More News' podcast) for a look at why Lorem Ipsum is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode..

Lorem Ipsum. Known for being Latin. Famous for being filler. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Lorem Ipsum is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Cody Johnston and Katie Stoll return this week. They are the news dude and dudette producer, other figure who is not Wormbo, of the amazing YouTube channel Some More News, which is, I feel, just putting the internet on the right track politically, and also being funny. They make that YouTube channel Some More News. they make its podcast entitled Even More News,

they have a Patreon to support that work that they and a team of people are doing. Please check it out. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge that Cody and Katie each recorded this on unceded traditional ancestral territory of many Native peoples in the current U.S. state of California, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about

Lorem Ipsum. Lorem Ipsum is a patron-chosen topic, and it's a wonderful suggestion from Jonathan Smukler. Jonathan, thank you very much. Great idea. And for anybody who doesn't know, Lorem Ipsum is the name of a longer chunk of filler text that starts with the words lorem ipsum. It usually gets used in situations where people need a block of text for graphic design purposes or for temporary purposes before the regular text gets filled in later. Lorem ipsum also turns out to be the title of the podcast. There was a lot more there than I expected. So please sit back or continue preparing a PowerPoint presentation where you just kind of need to see where the words would go once you figure out your hit business idea. Sure. Hit business idea. That's a PowerPoint. Either way, here's this

episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Cody Johnston and Katie Stoll. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Katie, Cody, thank you so much for coming back, doing this again. And, of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Either of you can start. But how do you feel about Lorem Ipsum?

You, me? I don't have much of an opinion. I got to tell you, I didn't know what Lorem Ipsum was. I know that our friend Soram Bui is a big font guy. And I wasn't sure. And I was like, no, it's a font. And I'll be honest. Also, as I was like, no, it's a font. And I'll be honest also, as I was looking at it, it's pretty boring. I think it's a pretty boring font. Um, you know,

at first there was what it faked me out. So I Googled it to look. And the first thing I saw was actually a pretty cool looking font saying lorem ipsum, but it wasn't lorem ipsum. It was a fake out. And then I saw an actual lorem ipsum and i was like oh it's this one and uh just real quickly it's not actually a font it's a block of placeholder text well you would use to like demonstrate a font there's probably every font in this lorem ipsum set of text so here's so here's where everyone sees my big ignorance. I didn't know that. That's great.

Well, now I know. I ask people to prep nothing, and you didn't find out what it is. That's fantastic. I didn't find out what it is. I just got a general idea, and it's not a font. It's something more than that. Cody, you go. I mean, not much more. Well, so two things, I guess.

A friend of mine from college, it's like their Twitter display name is Lorem Ipsum. So that's the first thing I usually think of. It's just in my head. But also, I used to do, I guess, a lot of video editing and special effects and after effects kind of animation things. And so that's mostly my uh exposure to it is just like you start a new thing of text and then it's going to say lorem ipsum and then any like copy pasting is going to have that phrase there in the text um and then i just sort of like delete it and make the text what it's supposed to be and then move on. Right. I like that. I think all three of us are coming from different common uses

of it because it gets used to demonstrate how a font looks. It gets used in fillers and editing programs and then I'm used to it in PowerPoint. Okay, yeah. People use it for industrial design, fake text, newspaper fake text, everything. It's everywhere.

Yeah, it's all over the place everything. It's everywhere. Yeah. It's all over the place. Don't know why. Can't wait to find out. I'm assuming we'll find out. Hope so. I'm just like, I don't know. Help.

As I researched this, for one thing, very hard to Google a famous set of placeholder texts. You end up finding like dead pages in websites that have lorem ipsum just plugged in. That's funny. But also it turns out there's a bunch of gag versions for the filler text. There's one called Hipster Ipsum, which is placeholder text, but all the words are like selfie, banjo, bushwick, Marfa, Stumptown. Yeah, organic and stuff like that. So people who love placeholder texts, I think, have more of a feeling about this than I do. Yeah, yeah.

I'm sure there's a small subset of placeholder text superfans. Yeah. Yeah. Lorem Ipsumites. Yeah, I don't know if there's a... There's not a great pun. There's not a great pun there's not a great pun there lorem heads well and the and the text we'll get into how much or little it is but vaguely it's from the latin language i never studied latin as a kid but how do y'all feel

about latin the dead language to quote what is it rushmore latin's a dead language that's my thoughts i think that is that the whole quote there's probably something i said it and i'm like yeah that doesn't sound right technically it's true um um i took spanish in high school so i didn't i don't have a whole lot of uh i took french um didn't do uh not a lot of like Biology like medical You know courses So also not a lot of Latin Oh yeah sure Yeah so I got

Very little No Latin in my life Yeah we're all coming at this from a similar place And on every episode Our first fascinating thing about the topic Is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics This week that is in a segment called... Bum, bum, bum, bum.

Stats and numbers. Bum, bum. Stats and numbers. Stats and numbers. Stats and numbers. Stats and numbers. Got some pipes on you, Alex. I have sung the real version in a choir in high school.

I was going to say, were you in a choir? What were you? Was it like a Catholic choir? Because there should be some Latin, right? I think, what was I for both things? Baritone and raised pretty Catholic, yeah. Yeah. There we go.

Hey. Yeah. And yeah, and that name was submitted by Kathleen Estrada. Thank you, Kathleen. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. And this topic, there's a bunch of takeaways, so there's only a few numbers.

And the first number, it's not a joke. It's the number. It's what it is. The number is 69. I knew it. I number it's what it is the number is 69 i knew it that is the word count of a typical example of the lorem ipsum filler text i just plugged it in for word count and it happened to be 69 i don't think it's on purpose no like someone is like yeah baby halfway through we're gonna find out that's the big reveal this is like all about sex stuff that's the things like oh we gotta do the 69 text

i'm just like and takeaway number seven nice that's it that's the whole content that's it uh no but uh the way this filler text works is it turns out with like traditional generators of it, there's a standard set of words that are lorem ipsum. And then if you ask for more words, it'll just give you more random Latin words. But I went looking for like a consensus example of what the standard lorem text is. I pulled it off Wikipedia, because I figured they're picky and they would argue until they get there. And their example was 69 in length and i'll i dropped it in the chat i'll have it like linked for people obviously uh but that's the block of text that is the whole topic is these 69 words nice yes i uh yeah i always forget it's like uh that there's like it's like more it's like not like the phrase lauren we were like familiar with but then there's like, it's like more, it's like not like the phrase Lawrence that we were like familiar with, but then there's like all these other, other gobbledygook. Yeah.

I'll, I'm going to not read the whole thing, but I'll read the first sentence in case people haven't seen it. It's lorem ipsum doler sit amet, consecutor adipising alet, sed do eismad tempor, incidident ut labor et dolor magna aliqua. So that's what you're getting into if you actually try to read this as a thing.

And I had never really done that until like today. Yeah, I still haven't. I still won't. You can't make me. What does this mean? Yeah, that's why there are very few numbers. Because that's why I get won't. You can't make me. What does this say? What does this mean? Yeah, that's why there are very few numbers, because that's why I get into that. But the only other number this week is 45 B.C. Ah.

The year 45 B.C. It's a good year. For Lorem Ipsum, I think. Was it? All right. That is the year when the source text of Lorem Ipsum was written and published. And we know what it's from. It's adapted from a Latin language essay written by Cicero,

the Roman writer and philosopher and politician, Marcus Tullius Cicero. And the essay was called De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, which translates to On the Ends of Good and Evil. Ooh. Oh. I like it. But we'll get into who he is mostly in the bonus show. And this whole text is the rest of the main show. And that starts us off with takeaway number one.

Lorem Ipsum is a scrambled version of a real text. And it took an expert investigation for modern people to find out where it came from. Okay. Interesting. Very interesting. Fascinating even. Hey, thank you. Yeah. Like people started using it long ago as filler text and it's also like a scrambled version of the real words and it took, you know, along the way we lost where we got it and found out again. Awesome. Yeah. It was a mystery.

Found lost knowledge. Incredible. And yeah, and this thing, there's two main sources here. It's the London Review of Books, a piece by Nick Richardson, and then a piece for Mental Floss by Suzanne Raga. And so it turns out this lorem ipsum text, it's from one essay by Cicero in 45 BC, but we think it probably got turned into filler text in the 1500s AD by some professional block printer who needed words to fill in a thing. Apparently, people would often use the words of the Bible early, early on.

And then they looked for other stuff and picked this. Okay, that makes sense. It's like only a couple of books out there yeah gotta kind of yeah yeah we use the bible everyone knows that it's just hard to imagine a world where like it's difficult to get text but until basically now it was right exactly yes to like very very recently i'm honestly this is i'm just always shocked that texts exist this far back at all maybe that's yeah but like you're like this is so bc like i'm always just i mean i know that we we have texts i know that we have information, but it always just blows my mind. Yeah. It turns out with Cicero, he is basically the most famous Latin language writer. And it turns

out, according to some estimates, his words are more than half of all the written Latin we have. And then also a bunch of what he wrote is lost. Because yeah, every word he wrote had to be hand transcribed from thing to thing over centuries before now. There's got to be a lot of lost in translation, telephone mutations that have happened. Maybe not, but I always think about that too over the years, especially when you talk about the Bible or whatever. What was it at the beginning and how did it end up here you know like what what subtle changes have happened over the course of different transcriptions is my point totally yeah yeah the internet's forever but cuneiform is not yeah and and cicero oddly his writing has been relatively protected over time because a lot of people translated it from Latin straight to current languages like English. And also, according to the London Review of Books, the Catholic Church declared him a righteous pagan

and said he was one of the few non-Christian writers worth preserving and publishing and keeping around. So he's been in a great spot, basically in his life and ever since as a writer. Yeah, he never got canceled. He didn't have to go to Breitbart part get his work published right whatever the equivalent of bright part would have been yeah he didn't like set up a speaking gig at a college that would obviously be mad at it and then pretend that's a surprise and that he's been persecuted sell

shirts outside and yeah and uh and also cicero he got like just valued as a writer in general. People decided that his writing was valuable as philosophy, also valuable as just well-crafted argument and ideas and so on. And also in his lifetime, he translated a lot of Greek philosophy into Latin. And so he's also like historically useful and through line of philosophy useful. And so he's kind of up there with the Bible in terms of texts that got preserved in Europe in the last 2000 years. Nice. I mean, that's a pretty esteemable honor. And I never really think about him. Yeah.

You never really think about him. Definitely know about him. Famous name. Yeah. Famous name. Yeah. Until I made this, I was like, yeah, that guy. Great.

Yeah, that guy. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. That name. That name we all know.

Kind of a good dog name. Maybe I'll name a pet Cicero someday. It's cute. It's kind of cute. It's kind of cute. But yeah. And so some printer in the 1500s said, this is great. And like most.

This is amazing. We got, we gotta keep this. We gotta get this text. These 69 words. Yes. And there's also like some argument exactly when it happened. And according to Latin scholar, Dr. Richard McClintock, it's hard to find a ton of examples of people using it in the past. But they definitely started using it as recently as

word processing in the 1960s. And another big piece of evidence that's happened before that is that the Lorem Ipsum text is actual Cicero writing, but totally scrambled. Like all the words are rearranged. Some of the words have like letters removed in a way that makes them not Latin words anymore. It's what you would do if you want to make clear to like a latin reader and speaker that this is not an actual thing okay because yeah like it's the idea of latin like yeah we like there's this latiny kind of words but you take out enough that they wouldn't be confused yeah right it looks like something but it's nothing yeah yeah yeah and then uh and from there they bothered to make it into this and the resulting translation is really weird if you actually try

to directly translate laura mipsom and the lennar review of books they hired a cambridge postgraduate student to like take a shot at it his name is jasprit singh boparai he took a shot at it uh and here's the first part of what you end up with if you actually try to translate the latin okay row itself let it be sorrow let him love it let him pursue it ishing for its acquisiteendum ishing because he will abhold, unless but through conser. And I'm gonna stop. It's nonsense. That was so close to being beautiful. It was so close to being beautiful.

Like, the first half, I'm like, alright, okay, yeah, we got some good phrases in there. But I don't know what ishing means. Yeah, then it fell off real quick and real hard. The next line is, now a pure snore disturbed some dust. Now a pure storm?

Snore. Now a pure snore. All one word. Yeah. Oh, not like a real pure snore. Yeah, like those words but shoved together. Yeah. Okay, pure snore. Something about dust? words, but shoved together. Okay, pure snore.

Something about dust? Disturbing dust? Okay. Yeah. Not going to subscribe to that person's poetry blog. I mean, you could spend a lot of time trying to break down that poem. I bet you could extrapolate some meaning. First few lines, absolutely.

Like, really good. Again, starts out strong. This London Review of Books post, I'm very excited to link it because that's basically half the post, is that I'm trying to be like, if we try to treat this as poetry, like, how does it feel, man? It's fun. It's fun. Yeah. But yeah, within that, like, that very first word I said was row but spelled r-r-o-w because it's

not an english word it's it's a broken version of a word uh because it's row yeah and that means there's a whole nother takeaway here takeaway number two Takeaway here. Takeaway number two. Lorem is not an actual Latin word. It turns out the first word of the famous Latin chunk is a like broken version of a real Latin word, but not really one. Oh, interesting. Disgusting.

What's the real word? And so the real word is dolorem. they dropped off the first chunk of it and that word means pain or means sorrow oh yeah it's a good change probably what does ipsum mean ipsum means itself but ipsum itself back sorrow back to back to that beauty that beauty that beautiful uh pain itself is pretty it's pretty it's a good start it's a good start i'm realizing like eloquent writing has never really been a topic on the show i guess the great gatsby at one point but like like there's never been a show that's gotten more or less poetic on the podcast before so that's fun it's cool before this absolute gibberish yeah but yeah i find that amazing that's that entire second takeaway just that like lorem ipsum is maybe the most famous chunk of latin now and the very first word is not real

latin not even it's not even it's just junk and the text itself is now gibberish. Right. And also, most of us can't read it anyway. So it's junk on junk on junk. It's just not a thing. Yeah. And back to that first takeaway, people said, hey, here's the Cicero essay on my extremely limited bookshelf. I'll take it and make a text.

And then we lost track of where that had come from europe and english speakers and then this scholar dr richard mcclintock solved the mystery of it in 1994 so potentially for like 400 years we lost track of where this came from oh yeah which is fun it's fun to me that people just kept using it as filler but not necessarily knowing yeah it was the thing and like i don't know it's where it's what we do it's like this weird sort of like ingrained tradition that it doesn't matter where like it came from but it would be interesting to find out like maybe maybe it maybe it's filthy you know maybe we're like being like really really disgusting or offensive

whenever we do placeholder text. Who knows? But it turns out it's half of a good poem. Yeah. McClintock solved it in a very Latin nerd way because it turns out, like the classics community said, we don't know what this is, but it's not worth spending time on. And then by 1994, you could digitally index a huge amount of Latin text,

like just all the Latin texts we have, you could throw on a computer. And so McClintock looked at the text of the Lorem Ipsum block and focused on one rare word. The very first chunk is Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet Consectator. And apparently the word consecutator is real Latin and also very rare. It's just not used that much in text. It's a verb that means seeking or pursuing. But anyway, he took that and did kind of a process of elimination. He said like, okay, these are all the major texts that have it in it. These are the likely ones that could be.

And then matched up other words from there and tracked it down yeah what a interesting laborious process yeah i wouldn't do it but it is the kind of thing that like you really have to wait until technology catches up to be able to decipher this like to do to if somebody wanted to figure this out in like 1920 or something it would be like good luck buddy yeah in a library forget it with physical books no yeah it would just take take kind of like just the luck of the draw right like okay this one place happens to have this one and it worked out as opposed to like yeah like search the database right i can try ctrl f and then it kind of went from there yeah ctrl f yeah yeah powerful tool that's how we know yeah so that's two whole takeaways that's a lot of what this is but

the next takeaway is the actual meaning of what's being said. Here we are. Yes. Let's go into takeaway number three. The actual Lorem Ipsum text comes from an essay about pain and morality. Okay. So it's philosophy stuff. Yeah. All right. And so if you ungarble it, if you look at the actual chunk that most of the words are from, it's Cicero, who was a philosopher in addition to a politician and a rich guy and other stuff.

He looked into basically the human experience of pain and how that relates to the goodness and badness of our actions. That's cool. Still trying to figure that out. Yeah. We're still struggling with that one it's good to see some things never change people who are way into classical languages and these guys that's that's the whole reason they're like i have the best education because i went to probably a british private school and

had to study this and that's that's why because is like, it's timeless stuff. Yeah. But I, and I had just never known, I had just ignored bothering to find out. There's a few sites that have a translated version of the actual text. And here's what Cicero actually said in English. Nor is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain. But occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. End quote. Yeah. It turns out the broader text is an argument

with the philosophical school of hedonism. And in super simple terms, hedonism is about pursuing pleasure as the highest good. And so he's asking whether you need to like divert into painful situations to get to more. Or to arrive at that level of pleasure. Yeah. That's interesting.

I've got an opinion on that. I agree with Cicero. I think that, not to knock if you identify as a hedonist, although I did date someone who did and that didn't work out. But... Identified as? Yeah, he would call as a hedonist. Although I did date someone who did and that didn't work out, but. Identified as? Yeah. He would call himself a hedonist.

So. Oh no. Should have bailed real quick there. But that wasn't the sexy thing that he thought it was. But it's the bad X. It's the bad X that people have heard me talk about. But I think that you joy exists because pain exists, that all of our hard things allow us to feel joy and to experience the depth of our emotions. So I don't think it's something to run away from.

Not that it's easy. I just think that's the human experience. And yin and yang, baby. Yeah. Not that it should necessarily be pursued but that it isn't necessarily side of it's like that well and it's unavoidable you're going to go you're going to feel pain emotional and otherwise you know existence is pain life is pain princess anyone who's tells you different is selling something that's not the direct quote from a princess bride but no it's not here we go me doing general quotes for movies i remember in

my childhood also like if you want to do a period drama at any point in like 2 000 years of european history you could have the characters quote cicero and if they're relatively rich or literate it's believable like it's this is a very consistent guy across history because of his timing and language and what he bothered to talk about lorem ipsum my dear it's from uh nothing never mind it's from animal house right yeah yeah it's that famous scene from animal house that's instead of college on belushi's sweatshirt it just says laura mipson that's how that's the movie right

that's the song he sings on the guitar before he gets smashed yeah and i i have just been learning a lot researching this because i have never really studied philosophy either. I know some things about it, but like when hedonism came up, the first thing I thought of was the hedonism bot in Futurama. That's exactly what I've been trying to get to. There's like anyone claiming like, oh, I'm a hedonist. So you're like the f***ing cartoon guy? You're just pouring oils on yourself and like

and he's kind of a roman caricature he's like kind of yeah being fed grapes or something anyway yeah he's constantly being yeah like fed grapes going to like uh i like some like bath houses and stuff and just sort of like preparing preparing himself for uh for events in the evening. Salacious events. Yeah, that's all I think of. Yeah. And yeah, and Cicero, he was officially in the skeptic school for the most part, if people are into philosophy.

That is apparently his deal. But yeah, especially later in his life, he got way into writing things like this. And this is from a several volume work of philosophy. And also this philosophical work is dedicated to his friend Brutus. And if people know like Roman history, especially around Caesar, Brutus is one of the guys who stabbed Caesar and kills him.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. But he, you know, like authors dedicate books. He was like Lorem to Brutus. Yeah. Huh. So how do we feel about Brutusus uh medium positive where's history come down on brutus oh pretty positive we didn't cancel him either i would say like medium positive yeah medium oh okay and people probably disagree

but yeah yeah everybody disagrees with everything all the time. Well, that's just true. Wait, no, it's not. Thank you. There it was. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to save most Roman history for the bonus. It's great because we'll talk all about Cicero the person. But, you know, the two of you, I know you never think about politics or democracy. Never comes up. Never.

I don't even know what that means. My broad thoughts on Brutus are that he did a murder to prevent a dictator, but to keep going like a very elitist republic. Like with extreme inequality and codified stations. So he wasn't, you know, some people are like. So you're like, that's bad, but hooray. But also, never mind. You continue to. Yeah.

No gods, no masters. But also like this guy really wants a bunch of like gods and masters. Yeah. Yeah. Classic human stuff. Yeah. So probably neutral on him and really good character in the Shakespeare play. You know, that's that's about it.

Yeah. Sure. Off of that, we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney.

I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls.

Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. But there's one more takeaway for the main episode, and it's much more modern than all this. Jumping to the present day. Takeaway number four. A few years ago, some people thought the Laura Mipsom text was being used to send secret messages through Google Translate. Yes. And was it? And the answer is maybe.

Yeah. What? Even better. Get out of here. You're a reasonable man. Go on. The experts here lean toward no, but are open to yes. And one more time, this takeaway is a few years ago, some people thought lorem ipsum text was being used to send secret messages through Google Translate.

Where like you could plug it in and you get a very surprising response that could be like a secret message being read by someone else somewhere else in the world. that could be like a secret message being read by someone else somewhere else in the world wait so like you put it in you put the text in the text that we've been talking about just like verbatim and you put it into google translate uh it doesn't does it matter like from what to what like what language to what language or is it like you put it in good question excellent question and then yeah yeah the it definitely needs to be from Latin to English. And then I'm going to have screenshots linked from these articles because they have like a bunch of examples of what you get from doing it. And the thing that changes is you don't need to put the entire block of lorem ipsum in. You can just use individual Latin words, in particular, like the word lorem or the

word ipsum. And at a specific point in 2014, people noticed that they were getting really weird results from translating this stuff in Google Translate. And in particular, the main results they were getting tended to mention the internet and also tended to mention China. Interesting. Oh, yeah. China's internet, business on the internet and also tended to mention china interesting oh yeah china's internet business on the internet is there so is it like some probably some situation where like because lorem ipsum is like a placeholder text it probably gets replaced a lot online with like other texts

that it replaces it and so there's just like i i don't know how the internet works but like you know wires crossed we're like okay this used to be this but like something hasn't been updated or uh or or there's like some like latent cache or something like that that's saying like oh this this that turned into the word china means china and so like you put lorem ipsum in and it's like oh yeah because of these old websites that got updated or whatever that's what we think it is i'm just ramblingly guessing i don't know no that's a good guess i think yeah that's essentially the normal explanation for this yeah that's pretty much it yeah it's a placeholder so it's gonna have placeholder definitions and like be replaced by actual words that we're going to mistakenly say like, oh, yeah, that's the company. I like how the company in this is capitalized.

Yeah, yeah. Nothing ominous about that. The situation here and the main source is a Internet security reporter named Brian Krebs and then also further reporting for The Atlantic by Rose Avileth, who talked to him and talked to other experts. But Google Translate, it launched in 2006. By 2014, it was operating on machine learning principles. And in August 2014, people kept seeing that if you just put in, for example, the words lorem ipsum.

And remember, you're asking it to translate that from Latin to English. You should be getting all the stuff we've been saying in the episode. But you would get the word China. And that's not super relevant to those Latin words or fake Latin words. If you put in capitalized lorem, capitalized psum, you got NATO, as in the military alliance. I mean, it's weird. It's weird. This reporter, Brian Krebs, proceeded to try more stuff.

And if he did long series of the words Ipsum and Lorem, he got phrases like the China Internet marketing technique and China Internet gets things moving and Internet phone technology to China. And like a lot of I like phrases. China is the winner. Thank you to the Internet. China is the winner. Thank you. I like that one. China is the winner.

The launch of China. Twice. The launch of China and the Chinese. Please check that the vehicle, the Internet, a home business, the vehicle hit him. Yeah. And none of it lines up with what Laura M mipsum is it's none of it yeah and then how did china get so closely linked to laura mipsum yeah like one theory about this that could possibly be true is that this was some work around people found who were like behind the

internet firewall in the people's republic of China and trying to communicate around it or outside it. It could be either for or against censorship there. Krebs also tried some other phrases with more of the words from the Lorem Ipsum block, and he got stuff where when he tried Lorem Consectator Delor, he got the main focus of China. There was also one where he tried Consecutor Sit Sit Delor and got Russia maybe suffering. So now Russia's in here. It kept being international foreign policy internet stuff.

Weird. Krebs has a apparently pretty popular internet security blog. He published this and other sites picked it up and reported it. And they got a response from the company Twitter account for Google. But Google just joked about it. They said they did a big Latin joke. They said, don't worry, translate is safe. But when you try to translate nonsense, oie et gay on sensne, which is pig Latin. and i feel like they kind of talked around it like they just made a joke as if that's not a response they certainly did yeah they did not address uh

translate that pig latin for me uh it's you get nonsense it's just like nonsense and nonsense out is the idea yeah so it's not even that funny that's i was like maybe there's yeah but uh china is the winner thank you to the internet is not nonsense that's a very clear like with a clear meaning right like none of like none of the phrases that it actually popped out while being weird and like not accurate they are like it's not nonsense they're phrases and like uh yeah words with meaning exactly so i would say that maybe yeah maybe google forgot about its original slogan don't be evil and it's up to no good right remember that remember how they were just like yeah don't be evil and then like

quietly they're like what if we just dropped it and like started like being a little evil i like china is a pain department he is a smart consumer let's focus russia may be suffering god the pain may be enhanced china may be home weird weird weird weird weird yeah we're all just saying i'll look for people it's these huge charts with various phrases yeah and they're they're like one of them is it's ipsum lorem ipsum ipsum lorem ipsum i i know i've mumbled that but six words you get the phrase the vehicle that hit him what is that even going on what does that mean well it's referring to some very very specific uh objects after a very specific situation so like confusing and there's more to it you expect more but it's not nonsense right google was like can

you believe how nothing's happening and no so it's something that's going on there's like referencing something like that's the bad response and explanation so this is weird i typed in lauren lauren if some on my google translate and if i stop if I just say lorem ipsu, no M, it says the internet itself. And then when I complete the phrase, it changes to just lorem ipsum. Anyway, maybe that's not interesting. No, it is. Because it's the, like, the thing that happened here is August 2014, Google publicly is like, who knows?

And then also, basically immediately after Krebs reported this, Google Translate changed to just deliver the kind of translation we've been doing, where it either gives you the basic English or just returns the Latin or broken Latin as not translatable. So Google also actively altered what what translate was putting out after people noticed was actually yeah the work it was actually yeah so yeah so apologies to listeners if they've been playing with google translate for the past several minutes and surprised they're not getting it that's why it's it has been like immediately and quietly patched as well that is interesting that lorem ipsu says the internet itself. It does. Is that doing it for you?

Yeah. Yeah, you're still getting these phrases. That's so interesting. I'm getting a phrase. I just assume. But it's like. Lorem, it translates to internet. Yeah.

Which I have to assume is not the original meaning. Yeah. Of the Latin word. That's a original meaning. Yeah. Of the Latin word. That's a solid guess. Unless. Unless. Those were so smart. Way smarter than we thought they were.

Unless. Unless. Al Gore did not invent the internet. Yeah. Cicero was terminally online. Loved it. Couldn't get enough. Couldn't log off.

I mean, no wonder. I mean, he's a bummed out guy because of all that doom scrolling. Dude, put down the phone. Go, you know. Yeah. Just hang out with the hedonists for like a day and then go back to your... Anyway, sorry, Alex. You've got lots to get through. No, no, no.

No, yeah, the Residence Takeaway is basically people's theories on what actually happened. Because one theory is like spy stuff or something. But Brian Krebs and then this Atlantic writer, Rose Avaleth, they teamed up on what do we think is going on. And they think the most likely answer, but not for sure, is it's a problem with machine learning. And that's a process I don't really know a lot about. But they say that in general, a thing like Google Translate is always training itself based on its previous responses. And they think, quote, the algorithm simply doesn't have enough new Latin documents to pull from to help it make sense of Latin text.

So when we feed it nonsense text like lorem ipsum, it does the best it can to make meaning from it to find the connections it thinks we're seeking from the bank of information it has, end quote. And most of the information it has is online. And so it just the theory is it just started pulling from statements about the internet. And I guess China has a large population and gets talked about a lot, like that kind of thing. I guess it does. So it's like a limited version of artificial intelligence trying to make something out of junk.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense as well. You know, you're struggling to translate gibberish. You're going to pull from wherever. Better explanation than, uh, you put in nonsense. You get words that don't mean anything. Yeah, because Google could have also said the more concrete thing we just said that is related

but not like chippy you know like i mean they could have said like my initial guess yes that too like it's like yeah it's like i don't know maybe this instead of like i don't worry about it i look the other way please i who who's with me I think Cody should replace Google he's doing a better job I second third I agree all right we have a quorum lorem ipsum what uh and also with Google Translate there there's a thing Brian Krebs said about it that I find amazing because I just think of this stuff as all machines and coding but he described the Google

Translate algorithm as trying to in a sense quote impress its creators by finding a meaning for lorem ipsum all on its own and that's like wild it's almost spookier than spies that that could be the reason

it's returning to itsier than spies that that could be the reason yeah it's returning to your creators yeah or i guess some like dysfunction with your parents but yeah no that's spooky to me that's very spooky yeah and so they think that's one of the big reasons that this could be normal um normal yeah normalish and then uh and rose evaleth also suggests that another reason this could be happening is the result of huge organizations such as the united nations and the european union because those organizations put basically more online labor into translating their online stuff than anybody else and so if somebody at one of those orgs is doing like a bunch of placeholder pages with just laura mepsom thrown in and then they put the translations in later that could be

leading google translate to pick that up and then also google translate might be like these are international foreign policy pages the words must have something to do with like china and the internet okay yeah interesting which is also like a pretty straightforward explanation of how this weird thing happens if it's why yeah again like just say that like just like that just that their response is just such a non-response. It's fine. It's fine. We don't have to worry about it. Yeah, and also like...

You seem worried about it. I am a little worried about it. Cody's worried because he has to replace Google soon, and he has to see what he would do, right? We had a vote, and now I'm like, I don't know. What would I say? Well, Cody, that's why you've been voted into this job. It's not like on anyone else to tell you how to do this.

This is for you to discover. Right. You can do it. Got some wacky stuff coming up in the pipeline. We're going to get weird with Google. Cody, I like the idea that you're like, I'm going to do a big announcement about Google being wacky. And then your idea is just Google doodles. And people are like, they already did that.

You need something else. Every day we're going to have like a new little like animation for you to make it fun. Already thought of that. I don't even go to the Google homepage. Me neither. I only I hear about the doodles if they get in the news. Otherwise, I don't see them. Yeah.

Yeah. I just don't ever go there. news. Otherwise, I don't see them. I just don't ever go there. Now there's no doodles. They're scrambling because they know new management's coming. No Google today. No doodle today. Grabbing doodles as they

flee the building. He doesn't get any of these. Yeah. You'll never take us alive linda and then the the last last potential explanation here is like secret messaging like somebody altering how google translate does this because and this is the most likely, I'd say. This has confirmed what happened. Most fun, therefore. Because, like, Rosevelo, she interviewed many people, and one of them is Pedro Domingos,

who's a machine learning researcher at the University of Washington. And he says that it would be very easy to, like, set this up and make Google do it, even if you're not at Google. He says, all you need to do is put up a wall of dummy text along with the translation you want on a website, and then just get it prominent enough in front of Google. And then that's how I would do it. Right. Yeah, there's like gaming the system, right? You can just be like, yeah, we get enough hits here, like push it up to the top, and then it's going to be that.

Interesting. Yeah, and it is also like equally easy for somebody working at Google if they're trying to do it on purpose to like code something to block you from doing that. But until they notice, you could just get away with this. And so this expert, Pedro Domingos, and at least a few other people think that that's actually what happened. There was some kind of secret message passing about probably something involving the People's Republic of China. And they used lorem ipsum. And now it's changed. But I do like that it seems to validate that basic machine learning explanation, that the slight variations on lorem ipsum are returning phrases like this, where it's trying hard and keeps saying internet over and over again.

Yeah, it's like, see, I can do it. I'm good. Yeah. Just a sweet little Google Translate. China is the winner? Internet? The cart China is the winner? Internet? The car that hit the man? Just like that child's drawing of a house and a sun in the corner,

and then China is the winner. China is the winner. Arrow pointing, the car that hit the man. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Cody Johnson and Katie Stoll for rolling with a lot of history and a lot of Latin. Because, hey, that's Laura Mipsom, baby. Anyway, I said that's the main episode, because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating

stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is a bunch of strange things about Cicero. Cicero. Marcus Tellius Cicero, author of Lorem Ipsum. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than nine dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring Lorem Ipsum with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, Lorem Ipsum is a scrambled version of a real text, and it took an expert investigation for modern people to learn

where it came from. Takeaway number two, lorem is not an actual Latin word. Takeaway number three, the lorem ipsum text comes from an essay about pain and morality. And takeaway number four, a few years ago, some people thought lorem ipsum was being used to send secret messages through Google Translate. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Cody Johnston and Katie Stoll and their collaborators make the YouTube channel Some More News. I'm linking its YouTube channel and its Patreon page and their podcast, which is called Some More News. I'm linking its YouTube channel and its Patreon page and their podcast, which is called Even More News. That is the place to go for smart, funny, correctly critical analysis of our political moment. And it's Cody, it's Katie, it's other

friends of the show like David Christopher Bell and Katie Golden. It's a wonderful thing that's going on. And there's also news about boars. And trust me, you want the boar news. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. Leaned on a lot of sources for the content of the show. Also, I'm excited to link a University of Chicago web resource where they've uploaded an English translation of the entire Cicero book. Also going to have links to the actual Lorem Ipsum text, very prominent for you. And then in terms of research sources, particularly leaned on the London Review of Books, Mental Floss, The Atlantic, cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs.

Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly

fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.