The height of Anson Mount
Slop is filling up the Internet.
Today my Google Now feed even suggested (!) the following page which was focused solely on the height of Anson Mount. Now I assume Google thinks I'm interested in the actor because I've read about Star Trek.
https://berkah.blob.core.windows.net/ernews/how-tall-is-anson-mount.html
The article has a certain fascination, because it claims to be the ultimate guide to Anson Mount's height, and it goes in a lot of detail about it, for example explaining that height is often measured in feet and inches, or how having more height helps Mount find better fitting clothes.
It's also fascinating because it gives his height as 6'3 / 1.91. Google Knowledge Graph claims 6'1 / 1.85 without a source. And IMDb states 5'11½ / 1.82. The website Celebrity Heights lists 5'11¼ / 1.81. I kid you not.
That makes me wonder whether I'm yearning back to times when people were publishing stuff like this (I'm not):
Here we see reporting about a Twitter discussion between Mount and director James Gunn about actors lying about their height, and Mount seemingly being touchy about that subject.
The algorithmically pushed article also mentions Mount's place of birth in Tennessee (Wikipedia though says Illinois, but trust whom you will).
The Web has, almost from the beginning, been a place that you shouldn't trust blindly. I used to trust Google to be a first layer of defense. But the last few weeks indicate that this is no longer the case. Google will now push AI generated slop right to me, whereas it should try to keep me from even pulling it from the Web. I hope Google will figure that out.
In the last few weeks it's getting increasingly difficult to get correct information on the Web. I'm noticing it around Pokemon Go, where I look up whether a Pokemon has already been released, or how to evolve it. I get arbitrary answers, which I found plain wrong several times. Google's results are not ranked by trustworthiness, and now I have to start to remember which sites to trust, which sucks.
This is going to be exhausting.
(And if you think this is only true about pop culture stuff, then bless your heart)
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