Quebec’s sweetly haunting garden of decaying books
Take a trip to the book bindery and see how books come to life in this vintage episode of Reading Rainbow. Then, watch the evolution of how books are made, from A.D. 400 to today.
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Many of us will accumulate vast libraries of digital books and music over the course of our lifetimes. But when we die, our collections of words and music may expire with us.
Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.
And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,” says Evan Carroll, co-author of “Your Digital Afterlife.” “Legally dividing one account among several heirs would also be extremely difficult.”
» via MarketWatch
Letters, Words and the English Language
In the 1960s, Mark Mayzner culled 20,000 words from newspapers, magazines and books to study the frequency of letters and words, analyze word length and explore where letters appeared within words.
Last month he contacted Google research chief Peter Norvig to see what Norvig could do with Google’s much larger sample size and contemporary computational power.
Norvig complied, downloaded the Google books Ngrams raw data set, and came up with the following after analyzing 97,565 distinct words which were mentioned over 743 billion times.
Some takeaways:
- Word Counts: The, Of, And, To, In and A are the English language’s most popular words.
- Word Length: The average length of English words weighted by their popularity is 4.79 letters long.
- Word Length, Part II: The average length of all 97,565 distinct words is 7.6 letters long.
- Popular Letters: E, T and A are the most common letters in the English alphabet.
- Popular Letters Within Words: T most frequently begins a word, E most frequently ends a word.
Back in the day, Mayzner used IBM punchcards to sort his data. Today, Norvig used his personal computer and writes:
Here’s where you would typically see a comparison saying that if you punched the 743 billion words one to a card and stacked them up, then assuming 100 cards per inch, the stack would be 100,000 miles high; nearly halfway to the moon. But that’s silly, because the stack would topple over long before then. If I had 743 billion cards, what I would do is stack them up in a big building, like, say, the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center, which has a capacity of 3.6 million cubic meters. The cards work out to only 2.9 million cubic meters; easy peasy; room to spare. And an IBM model 84 card sorter could blast through these at a rate of 2000 cards per minute, which means it would only take 700 years per pass (but you’d need multiple passes to get the whole job done).
Read through for more findings along with Norvig’s methodology for exploring the data.
Peter Norvig, English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited.
Image: Letter Counts by Position Within Words, by Peter Norvig. Select to embiggen.
The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
HUGE NEWS: Democrats in Congress have introduced new legislation that would restore Net Neutrality!
Tell Congress: Keep the Internet WEIRD — and SAVE NET NEUTRALITY
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and other journalists are being punished for covering the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Local authorities recently issued an arrest warrant for Goodman and arrested at least two independent reporters — and this crackdown on press freedom will continue if we don’t speak up now.
How Facebook plans to take over the world
“Disrupting Facebook would be like trying to disrupt telephone calls, it’s so ubiquitous,” says Paul Adams, former Facebook staffer.
If live video is Facebook’s phase four, then artificial intelligence and virtual reality look like being big parts of phase five. Both of these fit its strategy of monetizing as many of our social interactions as possible.
Lawyers Speak Out About Massive Hack of Prisoners’ Phone Records:
The mass recording of inmate calls is itself a fairly recent practice, sold by private telecommunications companies, like Securus, to jails and prisons as a security measure — a way to thwart violent uprisings, for example, or curb the introduction of contraband into a facility. This bulk surveillance — the recording and long-term storage of millions and millions of routine communications — raises serious concerns about the privacy rights of incarcerated persons and their loved ones, says David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
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