Splashing around in the shallow end of the deep learning pool.
I’ve spent a lot of time editing Wikipedia. I do it for many reasons, but one of the sillier ones floating around the margins of my consciousness is that I like to think that, by expanding Wikipedia, I am in some small way helping the advance of AI and speeding along the arrival of the singularity. After all, Wikipedia has historically been an important training corpus for AI models. But large…
With monkeypox in the news, some people are encountering the phrase “men who have sex with men” (“MSM” for short) for the first time. I’ve even seen some hot takes positing that it’s a new invention being pushed by woke moralists. First off, it seems odd to read this plain English phrase which means more or less what it says on the tin as something sinister or euphemistic. Why not just say “gay”…
Dirty words are, let’s face it, a lot of fun. If you want to express your dislike for someone and a standard insult like “jerk” or “moron” won’t cut it, you can get creative. There are a few reliable recipes for forming derogatory noun-noun compounds in English. For example: Start with a word for a disgusting or worthless substance Add a word for an agglomeration or container Hence, dirtwad ,…
I recently created this graphic from the Google Books ngram dataset , mostly as an excuse for visual punnery. It compares the frequency in books of the phrases “first circle of Hell”, “second circle of Hell”, “third circle of Hell”, etc. The width of each ring corresponds to its frequency: Pop quiz: how many circles does Hell actually have? When we talk about a Hell divided into circles, we’re…
I recently started a Wikipedia article on the terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” . I was particularly interested in the origins of the terms. The article gives what I hope is a reasonable overview of what secondary sources have to say about the history of the terms. In this post, I’m going to share a bit of original research on the topic (which Wikipedia – quite rightly – has a policy of not…
Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty of room for articles about topics which are profoundly obscure, even downright boring. I should know, I’ve written dozens of them! Some of what I consider to be my finest contributions to Wikipedia are lucky to get a couple of views per day,…
Here’s the top comment on a recent Instagram post by Britney Spears: If you’re the sort of person who would follow Britney Spears on Instagram your response may be a nonplussed And? But if you belong to an older, less online demographic, then maybe attempting to parse this sentence left you with a bit of a headache. This is just one example of a novel use of not which has been on my radar for a…
I love the versatility of the word “thing” in colloquial English: You know that thing where you repeat a word over and over until it just sounds like utter gibberish? he just sat in his car and ate a whole thing of candy beans I can’t go out tonight. I’ve got a thing. It’s kinda like in the movies where one person leaves right as the other person walks in like 2 minutes later kinda thing. She got…
As an author, how do you communicate the size of an object? You probably compare it to some other thing the reader is likely to be familiar with. Take these descriptions of objects from Charles Dickens: a cauliflower somewhat larger than a chaise-umbrella a bit about the size of a walnut put upon the plate a bouquet, the size of a prize cauliflower in his buttonhole his potter’s wheel - a disc…
It’s a great time for women on SNL. Since the early 2000’s, the majority of the show’s breakout stars have been women. Of the 18 Emmy nominations for acting the show has received since 2000, 14 went to women. An anecdotal trend I’ve noticed in recent seasons is an increasing number of sketches with entirely female ensemble casts. I was curious to see whether this is actually borne out in the data,…