Can I see the iPad? "Patience", he said.
July 5, 2013 12:16 PM   Subscribe

Anagramatron is a tumblr blog that hosts algorithmically detected pairs of twitter anagrams. [via mefi projects]
posted by cortex (39 comments total) 75 users marked this as a favorite
 
Some of those are oddly, poetically in sync.
posted by oddman at 12:20 PM on July 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


I keep wanting to post my favorite but is impossible to pick just one. It's pure joy all the way down.

(Except for the fact the "Oh Dean Winchester" wasn't from the real Blake Lively, which bummed me out a bit.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:24 PM on July 5, 2013


Why is Hector.ignoring me/I'm going to cry in the shower
posted by The Whelk at 12:24 PM on July 5, 2013


Yeah, if you want the straight feed of anagrams, visit the actual Anagramatron. The tumbler blog is the curated cream of the crop. The genius of this machine is made truly great by the careful curating of the tumblr.
posted by carsonb at 12:24 PM on July 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


I love this.
posted by threeants at 12:34 PM on July 5, 2013


CHEATING, CHEATING, CHEATING!!!!!!!

Teaching, teaching, teaching.

posted by threeants at 12:36 PM on July 5, 2013 [7 favorites]


This one would be much better if the tweet order was reversed.
posted by Metroid Baby at 12:37 PM on July 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


I'm kind of surprised it finds this many anagrams. I'll have to do some math.
posted by madcaptenor at 12:37 PM on July 5, 2013


"Holy crap I'm late" <> "metaphorically"

I am speechless.
posted by saturday_morning at 1:02 PM on July 5, 2013 [13 favorites]


@madcaptenor, the algorithm is clever in a way that avoids having to be anywhere near as smart as I initially thought it would be. Check out the gh page: https://github.com/cmyr/anagramer

tldr; It listens to twitter until it finds potential anagrams and puts those up for manual review.
posted by pmv at 1:07 PM on July 5, 2013


It seems to ignore numerals?

Also, oh, god, the bad grammar. Baby your so worth it should just. not. count. *grumbles*

I'm ready to go lay in my bed.

LIE. LIE. You're ready to go lie in your bed. Make an anagram out of that!

posted by BrashTech at 1:08 PM on July 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


I don't use the "best of the web" lightly, but I think this is one of the best things I've seen on the internet, at least for a long while. This is excellent.

A couple of cool side-links might be to the ones that are the longest, or shortest.
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:11 PM on July 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


I wasn't surprised about the algorithm - seems pretty easy. I was surprised that it actually finds anything nontrivial - at first glance there seem to be so many different things to say.
posted by madcaptenor at 1:11 PM on July 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


this is super clever, really cool!
posted by meta87 at 1:17 PM on July 5, 2013


I sent this to a friend who replied with the equally amazing Pentametron (previously). It trawls for tweets and makes them into sonnets!
posted by saturday_morning at 1:20 PM on July 5, 2013 [11 favorites]


Also, oh, god, the bad grammar. Baby your so worth it should just. not. count. *grumbles*

Oh man, I totally disagree. The whole reason this is so awesome is because it finds "real" anagrams in people's vernacular that could never ever be derived by a dictionary-based anagram generator in a million years.
posted by threeants at 1:22 PM on July 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


Two of my favorites from the top:
"She needs to let me go out!" <> "Get used to the lonesome"
"Me and Maria are sloths" <> "Ramadan is almost here!"
posted by Didymium at 1:23 PM on July 5, 2013


"I even slap hoes"; Ephesians 5:1-2 #love
posted by straight at 1:31 PM on July 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


I sent this to a friend who replied with the equally amazing Pentametron

I clicked and got one that ended "If only angels didn't fly away/I hope tomorrow isn't like today." Way to pluck my heartstrings, Twitter Machine
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:58 PM on July 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


I sent this to a friend who replied with the equally amazing Pentametron

Things like this make me realize how enormous the daily volume of tweets actually is. The mind boggles. "Sir, the infinite monkeys have arrived and they want to know what to do with the Shakespeare."
posted by The Bellman at 2:33 PM on July 5, 2013 [31 favorites]


I'm kind of surprised it finds this many anagrams. I'll have to do some math.

I was really surprised, too. It really flew in the face of my own intuition. I guess this gap between our intuition and reality is sort of a larger-number version of the birthday paradox. I guess with such a huge set of tweets out there, if you're looking instances where any one tweet can be an anagram of any other tweet, there's a very very large number of potential pairs....
posted by ManInSuit at 3:11 PM on July 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Yep, volume is really valuable for this sort of thing. I've thought about trying to do similar things myself with mefi comments a couple times, since a corpus on the order of ten million comments is nothing to sneeze at, but tweets have the advantage of being naturally very constrained in size whereas very short mefi comments are just a small subset of the site's total output. I suppose I could extract individual sentences or first lines or something but that feels a bit like cheating.
posted by cortex at 3:38 PM on July 5, 2013


I'd just like to point out that between this, Pentametron, and the Aleph, Mefites have got this market pretty well cornered. Great stuff.
posted by Lorin at 4:16 PM on July 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


What a surprise to see this posted by Cortex? I would have never thought he's posted something about algorithmic linguawonkery.

Color me both shocked and surprised.
posted by Samizdata at 4:38 PM on July 5, 2013


I get hurt too many times

TIME TO SING MY HEART OUT.
posted by dgaicun at 4:58 PM on July 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Unfortunately the Anagramatron is shackled by the limitations Twitter puts on regular developers; cmyr only has access to a tiny selection of the day's tweets, hugely reducing the number of eligible anagrams. The tech is cool and he's doing an incredible job of curating the feed, but it could be exponentially better if someone at Twitter would throw him a bone and give him a pipeline to more tweets.
posted by Marquis at 5:02 PM on July 5, 2013


The name caused me to spontaneously devise this joke:

Did you hear about the new vinyl recording of all four gospels? Because of special groove-based DRM though you can only play it on...

...the Tetragramophone.
posted by JHarris at 5:06 PM on July 5, 2013


Hm, researching that after the fact reveals the tetragramaton is not what I thought it was. Phooey.
posted by JHarris at 5:07 PM on July 5, 2013


How I'm feeling, doesn't matter.

let me find something to wear.


Anagramatron is truly a philosopher king. Or at least a bumper sticker phrase making king. Either way, I'm prepared to submit to its eternal, autocratic rule.
posted by dgaicun at 5:24 PM on July 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


This thread is an appropriate place to link one of Weird Al's finest moments.
posted by dgaicun at 5:28 PM on July 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Are there mefi users whose names are anagrams of each other? (is there an infodump of usernames?)
posted by madcaptenor at 6:21 PM on July 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Please bring back the Metafilter Markov Chain Generator. We've been without it long enough.
posted by double block and bleed at 9:38 PM on July 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


"Are there mefi users whose names are anagrams of each other?"

!
posted by No Camped Art at 10:19 PM on July 5, 2013 [10 favorites]


Jermey's ...iron.
posted by The Whelk at 10:46 PM on July 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm honored that you paid the five bucks for that.
posted by madcaptenor at 10:47 PM on July 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


There some 900 Mefi username anagrams.
But even worse, take a look at these:
['omar', 'roma', 'amro', 'roam']
['maj', 'jam', 'amj', 'jma']
['aelis', 'elisa', 'elias', 'lisae']
['kml', 'klm', 'lkm', 'mlk']
['dave', 'adev', 'evad', 'daev']
['ajb', 'jba', 'jab', 'abj']
['bnari', 'brian', 'brina', 'brain']
['dmc', 'mcd', 'dcm', 'cdm']
posted by dhoe at 11:13 PM on July 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


best username anagrams:

firestorm/reformist

grounded/underdog
posted by dgaicun at 10:20 PM on July 6, 2013 [3 favorites]


I'd added a little subroutine to pentametron which looked for tweets that were anagrams of lines in Moby Dick. Nothing interesting ever came of it. This is a much better idea!
posted by moonmilk at 10:59 AM on July 9, 2013


lol I'm back bitchesss / I'll miss the Babcocks
posted by mcstayinskool at 8:12 AM on July 12, 2013


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