i am sad about this, too
From Sasha Frere-Jones at the New Yorker, on the sentiment analysis of tweets re. the death of the Michael Jackson.
It is reassuring that people are using “sad” correctly, though the paper reveals a less felicitous trend: thousands of people think that Michael is spelled “Micheal.” A study reveals that my degree of sadness surrounding this misspelling is 98.9%. (This was a double-blind study using an n of 1.)
In my own personal experience, I’ve discovered that many many people spell Michael “S-I-P-P-E-Y”, which is weird.