In "Lexico-cultural decay?", 10/9/2018, I called into question Jonathan Merritt's evidence for the view that "most of the central terms in the Christian vocabulary are rapidly declining". Merritt cites Kesebir & Kesebir 2012, who argue on the basis of Google ngram-viewer data that Study 1 showed a decline in the use of general moral terms […]
In Science today, there's yesterday, there was an article called "Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books" [subscription required] by at least twelve authors (eleven individuals, plus "the Google Books team"), which reports on some exercises in quantitative research performed on what is by far the largest corpus ever assembled for humanities and […]
They're getting to be routine, Mark's virtuoso skewerings of those who Google widely but not well — in the post below, taking on James Delingpole's effort to demonstrate that the Climategate story is undercovered by the MSM by showing that the number of Google hits for the phrase is disproportionate to the news stories about […]
A casual inspection of the 59 (true) Google hits on "Oooo, you look", suggests that Dr. Willis Jensen, a recent presenter in the brownbag lunch series at Language Log Plaza, vastly overestimated the correlation between utterance initial "Oooo" and sarcasm: the true rate is less than 50%. However, he is correct to identify "Oooo" as a common […]
Richard Smith, a 41-year-old care worker in Carlisle, England, did not think his name did justice to the exciting person that he actually was, so he changed his name by deed poll. The new name he chose was Stormhammer Deathclaw Firebrand.
A little over a year ago, Frank Jacobs published this admirable survey of a mysterious object that has perplexed and preoccupied us for the past week — The Mysterious Dodecahedrons of the Roman Empire, Big Think, Atlas Obscura (5/12/23): The first of many of these puzzling objects was unearthed almost three centuries ago, and we […]
Daron Acemoglu, "The Simple Macroeconomics of AI": ABSTRACT: This paper evaluates claims about the large macroeconomic implications of new advances in AI. It starts from a task-based model of AI’s effects, working through automation and task complementarities. It establishes that, so long as AI’s microeconomic effects are driven by cost savings/productivity improvements at the task […]
The recent controversy about Florida's new State Academic Standards for Social Studies leaves something out, in my opinion. The point of contention is the assertion (p.6) that "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit". Critics have taken this as an inappropriate pitch for the benefits […]
A few days ago, G.W. sent a question about this tweet: Remember—Biden tried to fire essentially every worker who didn't take the COVID vaccine. That's the real Joe Biden. VOTE! — Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) November 1, 2022 G.W.'s question: I noticed was that he writes "take the vaccine," rather than "get the vaccine." To me, […]
Or rather: Against the simplistic interpretation of physics-based abstractions as equal to more complex properties of the physical universe. And narrowing the focus further, it's a big mistake to analyze signals in terms of such abstractions, while pretending that we're analyzing the processes creating those signals, or our perceptions of those signals and processes. This […]
It's been a while since my last Breakfast Experiment™, but a conversation yesterday spurred me to run a simple data-analysis script with interesting results, presented below. The script and the results are simple, but the issues are complicated — consider yourself warned.
Helen Barrett, "‘Ça plane pour moi’ was a burst of Belgian punk with a dark twin", Financial Times 6/1/2020 [emphasis added]: Meanwhile, the perennially lucrative “Ça plane pour moi” may not be all that it seems. Bertrand mimed it in TV studios, but whose is the bratty voice on the record? It is a question […]