Larry Hosken: New: Tag: words

Book Report: Shift Happens, Vol. №2

It's the second volume in a set of books about the history of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working with text on various devices. This volume got into more modern history. Sometimes I was learning stuff, but other times I was just wallowing in nostalgia. Or maybe "nostalgia" isn't the right word. What's the word for when you find out that you misunderstood what was going on at the time? Decades ago, I thought I cured my repetitive strain injury by making sure I used different types of keyboard at home and at work. Now, reading this book, I figured out that what really cured my RSI is that the new "different" keyboard I bought for home was thinner than older keyboards, and thus didn't encourage my wrists to bend so much.

(OK, there was regular ol' nostalgia, too. Talking about Japanese text entry, I remembered how the then-newfangled Canon WordTank was so much easier to use than my Nelson's paper kanji dictionary. At the time, such a game-changer. Nowadays, the idea of a separate dictionary device seems absurd, tho.)

Anyhow, there's modern keyboard history, how keyboards migrated onto our phones, then (alas) to our phone screens. There are a couple of chapters about modern keyboard enthusiasts who soup up their keyboards with custom designed keys, custom-built boards… Uhm, I didn't really try to follow those chapters too closely because I already have enough hobbies. (Also, I would feel bad if I spilled snacks on a nice keyboard, so that's a deal-breaker.)

Book Report: Shift Happens, Vol. №1

It's the first volume in a set of books about the history of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working with text on various then-newfangled devices. I learned a lot, which might kind of surprise you; I'd already learned plenty about the history of this technology and that technology. But focusing on text brings you to some weird corners.

E.g., in the very-early days of typewriters, a typist couldn't see what they'd typed; the marks were under the paper, hidden by the typewriter mechanism. You might say "Well, any serious typist learns to touch-type at some point; but I dunno if I could work up the resolve to learn touch typing if I couldn't see my work when I was starting out.

I learned about Linotype spacebands. A linotype lets a typesetter make a line-of-type by typing text, laying out an array of letterform molds. But this tool, for book and newspaper publishers, supports full-justified text. It did that by changing the spacing between words; not so hard if they're just blips of light on a computer screen, but tricky when they're pieces of metal sitting in a track. It turns out that while the letter-pieces were flat, spaces were spacebands, tall subtly-slanted wedges.

|..____⚺____⚺___⚺__⚺___.|

When you'd entered a line of text, the machine would push down on the wedges, forcing apart the words until those words hit the edges of the track.

|_____ _____ ____ ___ ___|
      V     V    V   V

They fit snugly enough such that when hot lead was poured over the track, it probably didn't leak past those wedges.

I learned something about the history of the telegraph, surprising since I studied that pretty hard while coming up with ideas for that Telegraph Hill puzzle hunt. I learned about some of the also-ran devices that were devised, false starts towards usability. Many people saw that electricity could be used for communication. Someone at point A closes an electrical circuit; this causes something to happen at point B, far away but also on that electric circuit. But what should happen? It shouldn't require too much power; you'd have to drive that much power through the circuit. (Modern folks might think "why not run a little trickle of power through the circuit and use it to trigger a transistor to something more powerful at the receiving end?" but of course this is all before transistors.) I read about the efforts Francisco Salva Campillo, who had the idea of using twitching severed frogs' legs at the receiving end to indicate when the circuit was closed. I'm really glad I didn't try to write a puzzle around that.

So far, so good. Onward to Volume №2.

In the constructor notes for today's Puzzmo crossword, Zhouqin Burnikel says her original gimmick idea (not used) was people whose names had a fruit-word and a season-word. But she could only find one example, so she used a different theme instead.

That got me thinking, so I wrote a little script that looked through my phrase list for two-word phrases and used wordnet to detect fruit-words and season-words. Then I eyeballed the resulting list of fruit-season phrases to see which might be names. The program overlooked the fruit-season name that Zhouqin Burnikel found. (My phrase list doesn't know that name.) But it did find: Jack Spring (an athlete), Jack Winter (a TV writer). Wordnet says that "jack" can mean "jackfruit", and who am I to disagree?

Anyhow, here's the little script I wrote. I put it here not because I feel it's amazing, but because my previous wordnet-use blogposts fell out of Google's index, so when I went searching for past examples, I ended up having to grep around my hard drive like an animal. Anyhow, behold the majesty:

from nltk.corpus import wordnet

FRUIT = wordnet.synset('edible_fruit.n.01')
SEASON = wordnet.synset('season.n.02')

already = {}
is_fruit = {}
is_season = {}

def categorize(word):
    if word in already: return
    sss = wordnet.synsets(word)
    fruity = [ss for ss in sss if FRUIT in ss.hypernyms()]
    seasonal = [ss for ss in sss if SEASON in ss.hypernyms()]
    if len(fruity): is_fruit[word] = True
    if len(seasonal): is_season[word] = True

for line in open("Phrases_20240103_085450.txt"):
    score_s, phrase = line.strip().split("\t")
    words = phrase.split()
    if len(words) != 2: continue
    w1, w2 = words
    categorize(w1)
    categorize(w2)
    if (w1 in is_fruit and w2 in is_season) or (w1 in is_season and w2 in is_fruit):
        print(w1, w2)

Spoiler Warning: This post spoils a twist in "Not Your Typical Reincarnation Story."

I read a review of the comic "Not Your Typical Reincarnation Story." The comic falls in the isekai genre: the protagonist dies and is reincarnated as a character in a fantasy story. As in many isekai stories, the protagonist finds herself in the role of the fantasy story's doomed villain, but seeks to change the story to escape her fate. Unlike typical isekai stories, this comic's protagonist finds out that she's the 13th person to be thusly doomed.

As I said, it's an isekai story.

As someone who's had to identify the objects of phobias in a few puzzles over the years, I of course know that the ancient Greek word for 13 is triskaideka (τρεισκαίδεκα).

This leads us to the discovery of a new sub-genre, trisekaideka, a portmanteau packing "isekai" into "triskaideka". Some would say it's silly to define a sub-genre that contains only one work, but this word is too good to pass up (albeit difficult to pronounce).

The Hearst News~~papers~~ News-sites, no doubt jealous of the NYT's puzzle section, have launched their own syndicated puzzle page, Puzzmo. Each day there's a cool mini-crossword from the AVCX folks and some other puzzles. (I don't think you need to subscribe to a Hearst news-site to play the puzzles. When I tried visiting in Incognito just now, it let me get started on the crossword. To play some of their "experimental" and "bonus" puzzles, you need to join Puzzmo; as near as I can tell, that's separate from being a Hearst news-site subscriber, maybe?)

I got mad at a couple of their word puzzles because they leaned on some obscure words. E.g., I got stuck on a Typeshift puzzle and asked for a hint. The hint told me I should have used the word motlier. Motlier. As in "Look at that motley fool and the motlier fool next to him," I guess. I didn't want to have to use a desperate-Scrabble-ploy word to solve a puzzle.

I enjoyed solving the clever crosswords. I wasn't having fun solving the Typeshift and Wordbind puzzles, knowing that my scores would always be trounced by folks who could stomach using words like motlier. (Scrabble champs would no doubt point out that the real problem is that I'm unwilling to put in the work to memorize those weird words. Anyhow.)

Instead, I wrote a couple of little computer programs to solve those puzzles for me. That was fun. I set them up to favor using actual-words-that-people-use; but fall back to words-never-uttered-outside-a-Scrabble-board.

two computer windows next to each other. On the left a browser window shows the Puzzmo site, zoomed in on a Wordbind puzzle. On the right, a computer command line shows someone using a program called wordbind.py to cheat ahem I mean suggest words to use in the puzzle; it suggests using the ahem word backstamped.

Unfortunately solving those puzzles still isn't fun, even with the helper programs… So I stopped. But I still visit the site each day for the cool crossword.

I made some more word ladder memory drill web pages; and tweaked the computer program I use to make them to be not so San Francisco street-specific. Several days ago, I made a San Francisco street n...

Animals drawn using the letterforms of their words. Sidewalk chalk art in San Francisco at Judah & 20th, sadly faded by the time I saw it. ...

This morning, I spotted a van from local plumbing company Chosen Rooter & Plumbing; painted on the side of their van was their logo: They tease us by narrowly avoiding a naughty word in the...

I updated the lists of "popular" phrases and words over on the phraser page. These new lists have fresh data from Wikipedia and some other wikis. Perhaps making the biggest difference between this up...

April is National Poetry Month. Today is April Fool's Day. I had an idea for something fun to do today, but ended up getting pranked by the English language instead. Since I recently figured out ho...

I'm reading press releases about the Beagle Brigade Act, which would set up a center to train beagles to detect prohibited agricultural items in international mail and the baggage of international tr...

rephrased Phraser word+phrase lists I updated the scored word and phrase lists over at the phraser page, using data from a recent copies of Wikipedia and other wikis. Soon after I updated them, I saw that my over-enthusiastic tool tha...

Surfwords is an intense word game. I'm enjoying it so far… in short doses, because it's intense. ...

phraser improvements Phraser, the tool for generating word+phrase lists useful for solving+designing puzzles, is now smarter when reading crossword constructor dictionaries. Thus, hundreds of thousands of words+phrases g...

I've had a good time playing the word puzzle game Cell Tower at https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/cell-tower/ ...

Thank you Google Books for clearing up the burning questions on common English usage, e.g. is there a space in "backasswards"? (Answer: sometimes, but mostly no.) I usually say "bass ackwards" b...

I updated the big ol' list of words and the big ol' list of phrases on the Phraser page. A couple of months back, I noticed that The Collaborative Word List Project was now free. I've used the C.W....

I updated that Bewordled game, the one where you swap tiles to make words kinda like Bejewelled but with words. Now it looks prettier with firecracker emojis and clouds. After I updated it, it occurr...

The Collaborative Word List Project is a darned useful resource for word puzzle constructors and now it's free.* This is a list of phrases and hand-tuned scores. Here are a few lines from the file: ...

Daily 5-dle #0007 11 : 5&8&6&11&10 polydle.github.io/?classic/daily/5 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬜🟩⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜🟨⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨 ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨 ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟨⬜🟨🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜...

Okay, now RAISE is my new Wordle starter word. As before, I am not the first to figure this out. Last night, I was measuring a starting word's quality based on how many green and yellow squares it yi...

Update: This blog post, which superceded another blog post, has since then itself been superceded. Try to keep up. Also, my "only root words" explanation wasn't quite right. Apparently, non-root wo...

UPDATE: This post has been superceded. I've been playing Wordle, the online game that's like a cross between Mastermind and guess-the-word. It occurred to me that the ideal "starting word" would hav...

I got wind of a new-ish public word list for crossword constructors, the spread the word(list). So I grabbed a copy and tossed it into the big pile of data that feeds the "Phraser" phrase and word li...

Further Bewordled I read Allison Parrish's article "Rewordable versus the alphabet fetish," in which she discusses the design of the card game Rewordable. Like Scrabble and Bananagrams, in Rewordable a player builds u...

Updated "phraser" word list I updated that big ranked "phraser" word list (and also the even bigger ranked phrase list). It counts words (and phrases) from different sources than it did before. The Expanded Crossword Name Dat...

Google Ngrams Download There's a new-to-me set of Google Ngrams (big files with frequency counts for common and not-so-common English words&phrases&word-strings): Google Ngrams Download. I mention this because when...

I have a couple of iron-on patches but no iron. 👆 Still trying to figure out on how many levels that sentence is not ironic. ...

"Septuple" has eight letters but "Octuple" has seven. The English language fights you at every turn. ...

A few months back, I mentioned that I'd boosted phraser's word lists by using data from Project Gutenberg's huge stash of old books… and mentioned that I wished I'd thought to omit the non-Eng...

big ol' text corpus Project Gutenberg is a collection of Important Works kept online. E.g., if you'd like to read Shakespeare's sonnets and don't want to schlep off to some library for a physical book (ugh), you can dow...

The Dutch word "scheepvaart" means "maritime", not ovine flatulent whatever. ...

Remember that list of phrases and/or that list of words in a text file handy for designing/solving word puzzles? I updated those lists again with some fresh content. While I'm here: Happy Thanksgivi...

Huh. Neither of my senators' voicemail boxes were full this morning. Maybe I should start leaving longer messages. ...

As previously threatened, I've updated the phrase and word lists linked from the phraser page with more modern language. E.g., podesta was the 82,350th most "common" word on the old list, but with ne...

Remember phraser, that tool for generating puzzle-design-friendly word lists? I just updated it. I found OMDB, a big database of movie info with a public API. (Did I find it? Or did one of you tell m...

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Crossword Compiler Noob Diary Unsurprisingly, creating mediocre crossword puzzles is easy but creating good crossword puzzles is hard. Mind you, I don't feel pressured to create great crossword puzzles. For puzzlehunts, I only ne...

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Michael Agger wants a word for someone who speechifies about the future. He coined "Keynotist" but I prefer TEDifice. ...

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Link: Warren Spector, Playing Word Games Warren Spector does not, as far as I know, play uppercase "T" The uppercase "G" Game. But he designs lowercase "g" games. He worked on some good stuff for the Paranoia pencil-and-paper RPG... uhm, ...

Book Report: Ambient Findability This was not the right book for me. Rather, I was not the right person to read this book. Ambient Findability is a high-level overview, a survey of the surge of information that's coming at us, and...

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Link: Travelers Storybook I have mentioned this before: When I was growing, I spent a fair amount of time with Bob & Kelly Wilhelm, friends of the family. Bob was and is a storyteller. I don't just mean that he can rela...

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, from Seattle to Siena Some awesome folks in Seattle are contributing to their local Game community by setting up a web site with announcements and forums and stuff. Check it out. I fed their RSS feed into my reader so I...

Publishing News Tom Manshreck is in town. Tom was living in NYC, working in publishing. There's a lot of publishing around there. Tom was working on engineering textbooks, but he still cares about the literary st...

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