Comments on: Base 26

Base 26

hortense — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:17:06 -0800

Java Demo: "four-letter words have a special status in the english language and culture. counting in at over 1650 words,...this small project is an attempt to give a spacial overview of the entirety of this part of english language heritage, as well as to explore and visualize relations between all those words."

By: hortense

hortense — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:18:01 -0800

Via

By: bonobothegreat

bonobothegreat — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:27:44 -0800

I didn't understand it but I found it strangely satisfying.

By: jabberjaw

jabberjaw — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:34:22 -0800

Neat. I liked the letter "O".

By: hortense

hortense — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:36:22 -0800

I didn't understand it either, but it reminded me of lexipedia with wire frames :-)

By: 3mendo

3mendo — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:47:45 -0800

spooky, just last night i realized that java is a for letter word..

By: aught

aught — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:51:07 -0800

Apparently they have not yet completed their analysis of capital letters.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:52:25 -0800

Neat, but I think it ends up placing too much emphasis on alphabetical order. For instance, "dray" and "draw" are close together but "drab" is far away. But are "dray" and "draw" really connected more than "draw" and "drab"?

By: resurrexit

resurrexit — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:05:56 -0800

Cool; gave head ache.

By: jeremy b

jeremy b — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:16:52 -0800

It says "amid" is an adjective/adverb. "Amid" is a preposition.

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:23:14 -0800

Neat! I was just thinking idly about the density of permutations of letters in various four-letter words the other day, but this is about an order of magnitude more interesting as analysis and visualization goes. The wireframe frequency dimension is a little underwhelming in execution, though—for a lot of letters the scale is such that there's no obvious information about most of the strings, since the spheres all glom together into an undifferentiated mass.

By: Sova

Sova — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:31:00 -0800

If it worked on sounds instead of letters, it could be a really cool way of displaying phonotactic information. Especially if the three dimensions used were somehow spatially related to the place and manner of articulation. So...use the vertical axis for core vowel, and the other two axes for onset and coda, with glottal consonants at one end and labial ones at another. The patterns would thus be an intriguing way of representing the natural shape of English sounds.

By: logicpunk

logicpunk — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:43:56 -0800

Huh. This made me wonder what the distribution of word length frequencies in the english language is. Turns out it can be modeled by a 1-displaced hyper-poisson distribution. I wondered what the hell that was, which led me to this: Mathematical aspects and modifications of Fucks' Generalized Poisson Distribution. Circles within circles, people. Wilhelm Fucks is now my favorite scientist name.

By: box

box — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:49:31 -0800

Fucks' Poisson Distribution? Where's fishfucker when you need him?

By: Pronoiac

Pronoiac — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:02:36 -0800

what

By: ChuqD

ChuqD — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:54:56 -0800

Isn't that spacial.

By: FatherDagon

FatherDagon — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:59:43 -0800

You can click on the two circling arrows in the top left to stop the frame from drunkenly lurching about, which makes it a bit less seasickness-inducing.

By: FatherDagon

FatherDagon — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:03:22 -0800

Also, they make the entire thing about 'Four-letter words', and then censor "fuck"? What wuss crap. I mean, w**t w**s c**p.

By: Free word order!

Free word order! — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:41:03 -0800

Numerology 2.0. Which is a dismissive label I should ponder a bit more.