sky first then shoes: streetlights

2013-03-26

nice to meet you...

clearly some further adventures from the hedgehog and the bear cub who aren't always on time... it's good to hear that they've found a friendly broken-down lamppost on the boardwalk to share their favourite hobby with.

2012-06-21

geek is a synonym for lonely

some folks mock the elegant simplicity of Roget's Thesaurus 1805 invention as an outmoded form of scholarship. there's a school of computational linguistics which ties his hand-crafted word lists quite concretely to the ways in which the mind organizes language. in particular, network analyses of the interconnected web of concepts captured by this tried-and-tested old work show that it has the same mathematical structure as the thousands upon thousands of 'word associations' provided by hundreds of University of South Florida undergraduates, collected over a period of several years.

in one classy paper, it is shown that these thousands of word-to-word associative relationships can be defined as 'small-world, scale-free' networks, which, like a fractal, have the same structure the deeper and deeper you delve into their detailed complexity: a small number of words are massively hyper-connected to tonnes and tonnes of others, while increasingly small numbers of words are connected to increasingly small numbers of neighbours. the vast majority of words only connect to one other. it it's the same statistical structure as characterizes the links between websites.

so where does good ol' roget fit in all of this? his book of relationships has the same mathematical structure as the random moments of lexical spontaneity provided by generations of university students. good job peter mark, you started something quite special.

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also... there is a game involving dictionaries... but perhaps i should keep that one to myself...