All of Me

It's September already! Whether you're coming back from summer vacation or simply a well-deserved long weekend, I hope this jazz standard called All of Me will brighten your day a little bit - even if the rain clouds are rolling in. Composed by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons in 1931, All of Me became one of the most recorded songs of the '30s, and was often sitting at the top of the charts.

Jazz musicians consider this song an important one to know, as practicing it with 100% effort (or should I say "all of you?") can help you play better jazz solos. Listen to this piano cover of "All of Me" right here on Tea with Liya!

Just like you have to put 100% effort into practicing All of Me in order to solo on it better, you have to put 100% effort into the decisions you make here on the WWW.... or do you?


Listen to the song here
(Can't see an audio player? It might not work if you're viewing this in an email client. If you are on teawithliya.blogspot.ca, you may need to try a different browser.)

You probably think that no one can decide the webpages you click for you. After all, every search result is sitting in front of you, and you choose which ones you click and which you don't.

Image by janjf93 from Pixabay

But is every search result sitting in front of you? When it comes down to it, you're only seeing the pages that Google is recommending. No one has the time to scroll through a googol* results, so you look at the top 10 and then either click Close, or one of the links.

*A google googol is a very large number just like a thousand or a million. It's 10¹⁰⁰. (You really wanted to see 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000?) It'll be a long time before there's actually this number of pages on the internet - and by that time, Google's servers will need to have gone through a drastic improvement.

That's a lot of numbers! Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

So, that could theoretically mean that you're only seeing the pages that Google wants you to see. I'm not going to claim that the company is censoring content, but you might think again the next time you see a handful of search results, or even YouTube recommendations.

But wait a minute! If I watched all the videos on YouTube, my perception of the platform wouldn't be limited to the select handful that YouTube's algorithm pulls out for me based on what I've seen already.

Hmm. Let's see about that....

Oh no. Blue Text Liya is coming to shut my idea down, right?

You think you can watch all the videos on YouTube, right? But have you ever noticed that while you're watching videos, new ones are being added?

Thousands of these cameras could be rolling around the world. Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Hmm. I actually didn't think of that. I suppose I could just come back later and watch those videos.

Hahaha. You don't have nearly enough time! Did you know that four hundred hours of video are added to the platform every minute?

Whoa. 400 hours?

Yep, that's right. By the time you've watched a 5-minute video, the amount of time required to watch the videos uploaded in that 5 minutes would be just under 3 months.

Hmm. What am I going to do now?

And, what about all the other videos that have been there since 2007?

Lots and lots of videos. Another image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Uh... (oh no! What am I going to do?) Uh, those videos are, uh, outdated by now, uh, aren't they?

There's a big difference between old and outdated.

But couldn't I just use a second computer to watch the rest of the videos?

Well, that strategy might work if you had 25,000 computers that were streaming 24/7, but that amount of information wouldn't fit through your Internet plan, anyways.

I'm officially out of ideas.

Now I'm forced to give up. The Internet is bigger than I once thought it was. 

Maybe now you appreciate the fact that Google tries to serve you relevant content instead of making you scroll through that long list of videos. 

I also appreciate the fact that you, my reader, chose to visit this little webpage instead of all the other ones out there. There were many more waiting for you, but you came to this one instead, so that you could keep filling your teacup with music.


~Liya