Adam J. Calhoun has written a wonderful blog entry that illustrates, with some great data visualization, that it is possible to algorithmically distinguish different novelists based only on their punctuation habits. The idea is simple: just remove all words from a corpus of text and look at the patterns of the punctuation. Here is an illustration. […]
About: Mason Porter
Posts by Mason Porter:
The Acoustics of Breaking Chopsticks
What are the acoustics of breaking a bamboo chopstick? According to a new paper by physicist Tzay-Ming Hong and his colleagues at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, it’s kind of like the acoustics of breaking a bundle spaghetti: they both apparently resemble the Gutenberg–Richter scaling law, which relates earthquake magnitude to the frequency of earthquakes with at […]
The 13-Month International Fixed Calendar
We’re all used to a 12-month calendar, and we just deal with the fact that there are different number of days in different months, and that February doesn’t have the same number of days every year. That’s pretty crazy, right? Some people certainly thought so, and that’s why the 13-month international fixed calendar was proposed. In the […]
New Mathematical Model Helps Explain the Strength of Interleaved Phonebooks
Phonebooks made of paper have been going out of style, but they are still of interest to physicists. A few years ago, an episode of Mythbusters explored the strength of interleaved phone books. (Also see the sequel in Mythbusters, or maybe even try it yourself.) First, some context, in case you are a child of the 21st century, and […]