The oddest thing about the Republican Party and their response across all channels to the SOTU (last night) is how Republicans suddenly care so much about Haiti... About how sleepy Joe needs to "look to Haiti" (most common n-gram)... (Context: Haiti 🇭🇹 is currently an incredibly violent place with armed gangs engaging in a civil war to overthrow the PM -- who isn't in Haiti at the moment -- currently much of the fighting is their attempt to take Port-au-Prince's Toussaint Louverture International Airport.)

iirc the last time the most Russia-aligned political party used "Look to ———" as a talking point, it was "Look to Libya" 🇱🇾 in the 3 months prior to the Benghazi attacks, after Republicans uniformly decried Obama's use of military force in Libya as "an affront to our constitution" (another n-gram).

Earlier this week Biden slipped additional USMC MSCEG into Haiti, including FAST (Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Teams), without telling anyone or making a fuss about it -- or at least Republicans haven't gotten the memo. Expect a Haitian Benghazi-attempt in 3 months, approximately July 4th - August 8th.

While it seems to have been an attempt, Benghazi itself didn't derail Obama's reelection in 2012 (but it kept Republicans distracted and busy for a while). People forget that the future #45 was a presidential candidate for the 2012 elections, using the slogan MAG "Make America Great" (reused in 2016 as MAGA), but that he dropped out (Loser) ...to Mitt Romney! If you look at what Republicans were most mad about, about Benghazi, it's about the purported cover-up and how the attack didn't affect the US election that year!

But the timing and effort that were put in to embarrass the then-Secretary-of-State over Benghazi, at the time maybe paid off and ultimately it was used to great effect in the 2016 election against Hilary Clinton. Current Sec-State is Antony Blinken (who would make an outstanding president), fwiw. (Expect to see Haiti resurface in 2028)

Look at all this

what time traveler was responsible for this?

python matching with ngrams

# https://pythonprogrammingsnippets.com def get_ngrams(text, n): # split text into n-grams. ngrams = [] for i in range(len(text)-n+1): ngrams.append(text[i:i+n]) return ngrams def compare_strings_ngram_pct(string1, string2, n): # compare two strings based on the percentage of matching n-grams # Split strings into n-grams string1_ngrams = get_ngrams(string1, n) string2_ngrams = get_ngrams(string2, n) # Find the number of matching n-grams matching_ngrams = set(string1_ngrams) & set(string2_ngrams) # Calculate the percentage match percentage_match = (len(matching_ngrams) / len(string1_ngrams)) * 100 return percentage_match def compare_strings_ngram_max_size(string1, string2): # compare two strings based on the maximum matching n-gram size # Split strings into n-grams of varying lengths n = min(len(string1), len(string2)) for i in range(n, 0, -1): string1_ngrams = set(get_ngrams(string1, i)) string2_ngrams = set(get_ngrams(string2, i)) # Find the number of matching n-grams matching_ngrams = string1_ngrams & string2_ngrams if len(matching_ngrams) > 0: # Return the maximum matching n-gram size and break out of the loop return i # If no matching n-grams are found, return 0 return 0 string1 = "hello world" string2 = "hello there" n = 2 # n-gram size # find how much of string 2 matches string 1 based on n-grams percentage_match = compare_strings_ngram_pct(string1, string2, n) print(f"The percentage match is: {percentage_match}%") # find maximum ngram size of matching ngrams max_match_size = compare_strings_ngram_max_size(string1, string2) print(f"The maximum matching n-gram size is: {max_match_size}")

Look at this photograph

Everytime I do it it makes me laugh.

who tf was talking about Einstein in the 17th century??

Geschlechterwandel

Nachdem ich vor einiger Zeit schon ein bisschen mit dem Google Ngram Viewer experimentiert habe, bin ich kürzlich eher durch Zufall auf ein weiteres interessantes Ergebnis gestoßen. weiterlesen

Today's linguistics adventure: early uses of the word "blog".

I was back-browsing xkcd, as you do, and 1043 is this:

And given the...subsequent developments about Tumblr, I decided to make the equivalent graph today. I eventually found Google Trends, which I don't think is tracking exactly the same thing, but seems pretty compatible:

(And it's surprising to me, how long and how late Tumblr had more google searches than blog. I guess people stopped searching "blog" because everything was a blog?)

But before that I reached for ngram viewer, and got something interesting.

In this case, the interesting thing isn't the comparison; everything except blog is a visual flatline.

The interesting thing is, this search defaults to start from 1800. Why are there any hits at all? What's going on with that bump in the 1920s? (And a smaller one in the 1860s.)

Let's trim the ending of the series. We get this:

(Note this means that "blog" was more popular in the corpus in 1920 than in 2004, which seems rather improbable.)

Ngram viewer is drawing from the Google Books corpus, which is, you know, directly searchable. So I looked for hits for "blog" between 1900 and 1940. And the first valid-looking hit is from page 6 of that classic work of literature, Over-the-counter Brokers and Dealers Registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as of January 31, 1936:

Ah. Problem solved?

Almost! But now I wanna know what those other two, earlier bumps, are. In 1822 there's an arithmetic book that has stuff like this:

and it does seem like there are a lot more hits like that; I don't know why they're localized to the 1800s though. I think all the early bumps might be from that, though.

The expression "bend the knee" certainly existed long before ASoIaF. But since the first book was published on 06 August 1996 its use in English has soared.

Google Books Ngram Viewer, of course, only covers books. So there was a dip after the publication of A Dance of Dragons in 2011. Though because of the HBO series the expression has entered the general lexicon and is being used by people who've neither read ASoIaF nor seen GoT. So as of 2019, the current end date of Ngram searching, it was moderately trending upwards again.

The mass worldwide web, at least Net 1.0, began around 1995. That's slightly before the time A Game of Thrones was published. So there's not much data prior to its publication to compare online use of "bend the knee" before its release and after. But use of the phrase is now extremely common – particularly in political discussions. Mainstream legit news media use it unselfconsciously.

It seems to be used particularly often in connection with a certain US political figure.

However, with several criminal cases facing him this year, another GoT phrase may apply to him: Winter is Coming for Donald Trump.

Currently wondering whether I can get away with Pages using the word "edutainment."

The spell-checker isn't even batting an eye at it.

what was the usage for 'death note' back in the 1800s i need to know

me realizing half an hour later that skulduggery is. 200 years older than his taken name.

so like.

did he overhear it for the first time in the 19th century and just go 👁️👄👁️ and immediately change it, or

So....

I did a thing