Utility box decorated by Marc Wagenseil aka @_leaf_litter@instagram. Irving at 4th Ave, #SanFrancisco
2025-01-17T18:28:44.079154
I'm not sure how this graffito started out, but it turned into a good explanation of the science behind those online personality quizzes.
2025-01-17T16:45:26.740870
I have updated the Phraser word and phrase lists. Those of you who find these lists handy for solving/designing word puzzles, rejoice!
This update incorporates an epiphany! (It also has updated content from Wikipedia, etc, but you already expected that.) tl;dr I fixed many many mistakes, and I like the quality improvement. If you want the details, read on…
You may recall a quandary: Crossword constructors have hand-crafted lists of cool phrases, idioms, and such. I can download a few of these lists, and Phraser can see that SHORTANDSTOUT is a nifty phrase. Crossword constructors don't care about spaces in phrases; but I'd like to know where the spaces go.
So Phraser first tries to figure out a list of phrases that have appeared in text. It reads lots of text-sources: Wikipedia, text files from project Gutenberg, etc etc. But it doesn't realize that "short and stout" is a more-interesting phrase than "copyright 1995", which appears more often.
So it then goes through the crossword lists, notices that crossword constructors think SHORTANDSTOUT is cool, notices that "short and stout" is SHORTANDSTOUT with spaces, and boosts the score of "short and stout".
But what if Phraser never figured out that "short and stout" is a thing? Maybe it figured out the phrase "short and" and the word "stout" are things, but never sees that teapot song and thus never realizes that "short and stout" goes together. In that case, when it sees SHORTANDSTOUT in a crossword list, it just kinda shrugs, thinks "I don't what to do with that" and moves on. What a waste.
One time, I wrote a program that looked over my crossword lists for SHORTANDSTOUTs for which Phraser couldn't figure out where to put spaces. For each, it would look for a pair of phrases that could be combined. So if Phraser had spotted "short and" and the word "stout", this other program would spot that those phrases could be combined to make "short and stout". I kept the output from that program, and fed it to Phraser on subsequent runs. Thus, it would know "short and stout" was a thing the next time it ran; and when it saw SHORTANDSTOUT in a crossword list, it would know to boost the score of "short and stout". My phrase-combiner program didn't get it right every time. Like, if a crossword constructor like the very-obscure word BLUNGE, my phrase-combiner program would guess that must be "B LUNGE". But it was right most of the time, and the results were good enough such that I kept using it.
A few days ago, I was looking at one of the wrong phrases that
my phrase-combiner program had come up with:
diuretic ally
That's not a thing. "Diuretically" is a word, sort of. You can look at it and figure
out it's an adverb to describe something acting in the manner of a diuretic, I guess.
It's reeeeeeeally rare, though. If you look up diuretical
and diuretically on the Google ngram viewer, you can see that they show
up not-quite-never in books.
And diuretically appears so very rarely in texts that Phraser figured
"aw, that's probably just a typo" and forgot about it.
But crossword lists agree that
"DIURETICALLY" is a kinda-important thing. So my phrase-combiner, trying its
best, had come up with diuretic ally. And a couple of days ago, I was
staring at that and wondering: OK, why do all these crossword
lists think that "diuretically" is good thing to put into a crossword, given that nobody
uses this word in real life? That's when I had the epiphany.
The epiphany: DIURETICALLY is a valid Scrabble word. I looked through my crossword-word-lists and saw a fair number of words-only-Scrabble-players use. As near as I can tell, crossword constructors are pretty forgiving about Scrabble words that nobody uses but are figure-out-able. (They're not so forgiving about obscure scientific terms; there's no obvious way for a solver to figure the name of a rare sheep disease by applying grammar-suffixes to a common word, I guess.)
So I hauled out a SOWPODS list (list of Scrabble words), looked through the list of best-guess-phrases from my phrase-combiner tool, and thus found many other of my mistakes like diuretic ally. And I purged them. I'm now much more confident in the surviving best-guess-phrases; so I increased their "boost" so that they're more likely to appear in the 5-million-phrases file.
2025-01-08T22:49:16.765172
Today I saw a coyote in Golden Gate Park at 0745. This throws cold water on my "I haven't seen coyotes lately because I've been going out later and they're snug in their beds by 0630" theory. Maybe it suggests a "Something happened and the local coyotes are no longer so blasé about trotting along exposed on JFK Drive; they now sensibly skulk amongst the trees, where a city boy wouldn't spot them so easily" theory.
Anyhow, I didn't snap a good coyote pic, so here's today's chalk art from 20th and Irving:
2025-01-05T18:09:59.273894
I bought a new broom today. I chuckled over its brand, "Libman"—do they sell better in "blue states" than in "red?"
Curious, I googled [libman broom]. I noted the ads at the top: Which advertiser had paid the most to sway me to choose their brand instead of Libman?
It was ULINE, one of the most horrid "red state" companies around. I dunno, maybe I just uncovered a conspiracy?
2025-01-03T20:45:41.314991
I continue to check my little dashboard of San Francisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether visiting the nearby university food court for a burrito is a pleasant convenience or the event doctors will pinpoint as the most likely cause of my resulting long-term lung problems. You may recall that about a month ago, the California Department of Public Health frustrated me by switching from their old system, which had a handy way for my dashboard to fetch a spreadsheet with wastewater data to a new system which didn't. I wrote to them, but they never wrote back, sigh. So I looked over their new dashboard system (tried to figure out how to write an automatic scraper to fetch the data; failed to immediately find a needle of data-download-link in a haystack of javascript; gave up quickly) and just figured out a system by which I visit the CDPH dashboard once every few days, download their spreadsheet by hand like a caveman, and then a script copies the spreadsheet from my Downloads folder to a place where my dashboard can use it.
tl;dr, my little dashboard is working again, albeit with some manual clunkiness. The wastewater data will always be a little behind… but that was already true.
2025-01-02T16:07:51.738252
It's a semi-new mural on Irving Street:
2025-01-01T16:06:29.039060
If a puzzlehunt nerd happens to spam nutrimatic, does that mean they apply something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ham to something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea?
This semi-coherent thought ramble was inspired by the puzzlehunt team named 🎶Nutrimatic Spamilton, our name is Nutrimatic Spamilton. And there's a million puzzles still unsolved, but just you wait, just you wait🎶, as reported in the VeheMusical Wrapup
2025-01-01T16:08:27.735621
Here are three popular blog posts from 2024:
- "I see the NYT Tech Guild went on strike, so this might be a good time for me to post links to my list of daily puzzle pages…"
- "The Page Slow Street folks said they had a new street mural by Matley Hurd…"
-
"The paint job on this fence on Anza St. near 9th is neat; it's kinda trompe-l'œil, kinda not."
- Bonus link: This photo did "numbers" on my socials: "A specialized unit of distance for San Francisco in Fogust: That crane's swing arm is so long, its alpha channel goes from 80% to 5%."
- In 2024, my #EnigMarch posts were popular, though no single such post achieved "top three" popularity. Each of these posts was a puzzle designed in a few hours (or less). Dunno how much of these pages' popularity was from people eagerly visiting vs people desperate to look at the answers to hastily-slapped-together-perhaps-unsolvable puzzles. Maybe a little column A, a little column B.
Were you hoping for more than three blog posts? lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/new/2024/ lists all my 2024 blog posts, with more pithy observations than you can stand. If you'd like to see my posts in "real time" instead of an annual "best of," follow my blog and/or follow me on hachyderm (Mastodon) and/or Blue "bsky" Sky.
2025-01-01T16:10:20.724457
