Comments on FascinatingWords

4 Comments.

H.P. Lovecraft knew one criterium: their archetypical intrinsic unpronouncability. Tolien knew another: mixing for the (English) reader exotic phonemes and word melody (Finnish - Old Norse - Arabic for instance). -- BL

(I remember hearing, years ago, of somebody's theory that all language could be analyzed based on letter patterns using a particular 4 x 7 matrix derived from ancient Arabic or some such occult source. Sounded nutty at the time, especially in its claimed application to free-text information retrieval and relevance-ranking. On the other hand, N-grams do sometimes seem to offer an information-theoretic way to cluster related terms ... and hashing is a well-known and productive approach to some kinds of data manipulation ....) - ^z

Sometimes, new information can be discerned from old data simply by applying a new structure -- any structure! 'Course, there's no way of knowing in advance if this new information is in any way useful or relevant... :)

When in doubt, just XOR together all the characters in an arbitrary result string and discard the first byte. :))

-- Bo Leuf

One of my weird friend Barry's "Laws" is:

• All double features work.
  by which I think he meant not just movie double-features(!) --- but that putting any two concepts together gives something for the human mind to correlate and discover new structure in. (Then again, Barry is hard to parse at times ... see BarryLawsAndPrecepts for other samples.) - ^z -