Charles Shopsin says,
The Make blog had a cool post today about a computer made of K'Nex parts and I remembered that I had read about a really cool computer made of Tinker Toys built by Danny Hillis. I knew I had read about it in his excellent computer primer "The Pattern On the Stone" so I went to Amazon to try finding the page with their "Search Inside the Book" feature.
Well, I found the page but it wasn't what I expected. Instead of seeing a straight scan of the page it looked like someone had cut out all of the words and pasted them back on the page in the same order. It looked just like a ransom note. The picture that was supposed to be on the page was nowhere to be found.
At the top of the page was a note that said "Some images in this book are not displayed". Then I realized that this was Amazon's way around showing pictures they didn't have copyright for. They literally cut out all the text and then paste it back on a blank page. How ridiculous!
Link to Make post, and Link to Amazon Reader for this book (you have to search for "tinker," then click on page 17. There doesn't seem to be a way to link to a specific page).
Reader comment: Richard George says,
This could be a feature of OCR software at Amazon – in order to make the
text searchable and keep the original fonts some systems identify each word,
storing the original glyphs to display on screen with the machine recognised text
put an index – perhaps the background colour was wrong on that document?
