Drew Hevle raises a very interesting question: suppose you are stranded on a desert island; what books would be entirely useless in this situation? Here are a few books that I wouldn’t want to be stranded on an island with: Federal Income Tax: Code and Regulations Selected Sections A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates Government Phone Book […]

The pineapple sauce pancake graph has English words as vertices, and a directed edge from to if the concatenation is also an English word. For instance, there is a vertex labeled pine, and a vertex labeled apple, and an edge from pine to apple. Anyway, the graph is huge; and the usual […]

It was pointed out to me by Kenny Easwaran that I ought to try clustering texts that already have a natural grouping. So I ran the clustering program on 15 texts written by three authors, and here is the result: The largest eigenvalue is 25 times bigger than the next largest eigenvalue, and picks out the author […]

I ran my clustering program (which I just ran on the New Testament) on Shakespeare’s plays—which were conveniently packaged into a text file by Open Source Shakespeare. The result was the following graph: I know little about Shakespeare, so I can’t say too much about the above image. I’d love to know what you think: does […]

During Bible study last week, it was mentioned that people have used statistics to “determine” authorship of books of the Bible. Having a couple free hours last night, I tried my own experiment on the New Testament. The procedure was easy: I downloaded the Nestle-Aland 26th edition of the New Testament; each book in the […]