OT Day 23

(...)

That is pretty much the way it went.

Doc made me skip lunch. Read me a couple complicated and very boring stories and asked me detailed questions about them. Had to admit I didn't remember a thing. Bingo! Instant Senility.

--Winston

So, did they "terminate with cause" yet? That'd suck, unless you're ready for retirement.

-- The United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world. -- Ayn Rand

(...)

Yup. Sept 18, 2007. Took my badge, stopped my pay and locked me out of the building. I began recording their harassing phone calls shortly thereafter. They re-hired me then laid me off *again* on July 24, 2008 because they have a guideline against employees recording phone calls to their home while the corporation is committing wire fraud.

Turns out recording is legal to do if it is in support of an investigation of a crime. (Attempted murder is still a crime here.) (Technically Speaking)

:)

--Winston

Oh. I thought we we'd been talking about _recent_ events here. Did I miss the memo again?

You should change your sig, Winnie.

Winston 008 Stirred, not shaken

For more fun with your buddies, read W.E.B. Griffin's series entitled Presidential Agent. You'n Charlie Castillo, eh?

-- Some people hear voices. Some see invisible people. Others have no imagination whatsoever.

Hey that was *femtoseconds*, geologically speaking.

Ahh, not me man. I'm just an everyday working shlub. That series sounds like interesting reading though.

--Winston

Yes, it has been done more or less. You might want to see this NPR story:

Radiolab did a whole one hour show that you might find of interest, but as I recall just a portion concerned Alzheimer's. Suspect this is a clip from that show. I'm on dial-up, so I haven't listened to this particular clip but I did hear the complete show on Radiolab.

I downloaded the idea density analyzer CASPR, and applied it to my old biographical type writings that I could find, where I talked about myself. Looks like my idea density is 0.55-0.66, which is close to the "unlikely to have alzheimer's" range.

i

I meant CPIDR.

i

Interesting... I'll see if I can get it to run here, curiosity for the most part. My brain gets a jolt (enjoyment) messing around with new (to me) applications of all sorts. Not sure what I might try "feeding" it though just yet. Most of my ramblings are pretty terse and fragmented to say the least...

Looks like at least a 10 mb download so it will have to wait till tomorrow at the earliest. Thanks for the tip, I have a couple "concordance" type programs but this looks to be more diagnostic in nature.

This is a really curious scale. I'll have to spend some time looking into it. I checked one of my old articles, "Dry Gear Hobbing," (0.523) and Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." (0.543) But Hemingway avoided adjectives and used lots of nouns. In my professional writing, I do the same thing, and I write pretty tight, but a couple of my posts here ranked over

0.550 -- probably because I use lots of adjectives and adverbs online. And some of them are loose as a goose. (This paragraph ranks 0.547).

Good, clear, effective writing is generally taught to use nouns and verbs, and to minimize adjective and adverb modifiers. That's the school by which those of us born before 1980 or so were taught. Strange. Thanks for the lead, Iggy.

Leon, my only suggestion would be to "feed" it something autobiographical.

If you feed it, say, your instruction on how to tap metric threads or whatever, it will be not of the same kind and bound to have a different idea density.

Idea density is a fancy way of counting the number of verbs and adjectives and some other non-nouns, and divide by total number of words.

Different genres of writing have different "densities".

i

It can still be a useful tool. You could analyze a business communication and revise what was written accordingly.

Yes, low idea density texts are easier to read. One idea per sentence, is a good guideline, when one is to write concisely for the consumption of a wide audience.

This is why I posted another message, cautioning against applying this idea density metric to different genres, and then using results of such measurements.

The above two paragraphs that I just wrote, have idea density of

0.51. A post about my weight loss, from 7 years ago, was rated at 6.1, and it was written by the same person!

Your two paragraphs, to which I am responding, rate at 0.563. Unlike the nuns in the nun study, you are not 22, and you are not writing an autobiography.

i

Somehow, you don't look that old on Usenet, Win.

It is. I spent at least half an hour laughing on the previous book, _Black Ops_. I'm 100 pages short of finishing the last one in the series, _The Outlaws_, and I'm relishing the end. I'll miss the characters now that I'm done, though. This stuff sure beats TV all to hell.

-- Some people hear voices. Some see invisible people. Others have no imagination whatsoever.

I saw your other message. I'll have to try writing something autobiographical and see how it comes out.

I'm more interested, though, in the justifications for counting prepositions, adjectives, and adverbs as "propositional." I'm not arguing with it; I just have to see the basis for it.

It's very interesting to a writer.

Larry!

That is the nicest thing you've ever said to me! I'm touched.

:)

(...)

How do you *do* that? Set an egg timer and poke yourself with a rusty fork for a few minutes to simulate commercials?

I mean *no commercials*? Seriously?

:)

--Winston

I'll have to look around for a Windows machine because I can't get CPIDR to run under Linux Wine.

Thanks for this!

--Winston

I ran it on a Linux machine under Mono. I do not use Windows.

1) sudo aptitude install mono mono-winforms

2) download CPIDR

3) run it

mono CPIDR.exe

(send the money in a plain brown wrapper as previously arranged)

My choice: NONE for over 4 years now, and it's heavenly.

Every time I walk into someone else's home, go to the mall/gym, etc, I have to put up with that shit. It's ghastly.

Proof to the public: After about a week of going without any TV, try watching it for about an hour. You'll gasp, too. It's so bad you'll want to scream. See if you can keep up and count the number of commercials on in that hour. When I quit, it was 25+. UFR!

God/Buddha/Allah/Gaia bless the silence of a book.