Wordcount

Posted on 2013-01-20 by arjaybe

Wordcount Home Page

Wordcount Home Page

I found a site on the Internet called “Wordcount.” It describes itself as an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words. It ranks the words based on usage – the more a word is used, the higher its ranking. The word usage data come from something called the British National Corpus. The BNC is a one hundred million word cross-section of current British English, both written and spoken. It contains a broad range of samples of spoken and written language from the later part of the twentieth century.

The written part of the BNC comprises 90% of the corpus. Among many other forms of text it includes extracts from newspapers, journals and periodicals for all ages, text books, fiction, and essays written at schools and universities. The oral 10% comes from radio shows and phone-ins, formal meetings and informal conversations recorded by volunteers, etc.

Wordcount presently includes the 86,800 words that are used at least twice in the BNC. In the future, the site claims that wordcount will be modified to sample any chosen text or website, and eventually the whole Internet. I doubt that because the site seems to be stuck in time.

But let’s try it out anyway. First, let’s check whether Green Comet’s leading man is on the list. He is. “Elgin” comes in at word number 28,411. It is preceded by “lichens” and followed by “joystick.” I don’t think we can read anything into that. How about Elgin’s beloved? “Frances” appears at position 9,860. It is preceded by “excuses” and followed by “dusk.” As for this blog, “green” is number 671 and “comet” follows at a distant 16,896. “Green” is preceded by “planning” and followed by “students,” while “comet” is between “stafford” and “pol.”

The last word in the Wordcount archive, coming in as the 86,800th most used word, is “conquistador.” It’s preceded by “recrossed,” “workless,” “Carniola” and “tangency.” Carniola is a mountainous region in southwestern Slovenia. For the most used words we’ll do ten of them because they’re smaller, starting with number ten, “was.” Number nine is “is.” Eight is “it.” Seven, “that.” Six, “in.” Five, “a.” Four, “to.” Three, “and.” Two, “of.” And the number one word in the archive, the most used word in British English, is “the.”

Strangely, the word “wordcount” is not in the Wordcount archive.

rjb

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Parasite Puppeteers

Posted on 2013-01-15 by arjaybe

Parasite Puppeteers

Parasite Puppeteers


The effect of a parasite can sometimes go beyond the immediate health of the host. Sure, a tapeworm can steal nutrition, making the host weaker. Wasps sometimes lay their eggs inside other living insects, where they grow while eating their host. But some parasites go even further. Some of them can actually control the behavior of their host. It has to do with the life cycle of the parasite. If it’s presently in an ant and the next stage of its life cycle is in a grazing animal, for instance, the thing to do is make the ant climb to the top of a blade of grass where it can be conveniently eaten.

Half of all humans have in their brains a parasite of the type which is known to control the behavior of other animals. If they can control other animals, can they control humans?

We shouldn’t tar all parasites with the same brush. Some of them are fairly benign, even useful, as in the case of the pig whipworm. While the human whipworm infects half a billion people and can cause some problems, the pig whipworm doesn’t survive long in people. Just long enough to do its job, which is to treat inflammatory bowel disease, where the immune system gets overactive. Treatment involves drinking a concoction of pig whipworm eggs. It works by giving the immune system something to do, something it’s accustomed to doing like dealing with parasites, so it doesn’t attack the body’s own tissues. The results so far have been very encouraging. While drinking worm eggs might seem repulsive, it’s a lot better than an inflamed bowel.

Now back to the mind control parasites. There are hairworms that make grasshoppers jump into water so the worms can continue their life cycle there. There are flukes that make fish attract the attention of predatory wading birds. The flukes need to get into the birds. And there are the grass-climbing ants mentioned before.

The parasite which infects half of us humans is called Toxoplasma gondii. A version of T. gondii lives in rats and cats. Rats which have their brains infected are less likely to be scared off by the smell of cats and are more likely to be eaten. The parasite carries on in the gut of the cat.

Can this parasite affect the behavior of humans? There seems to be a link between it and schizophrenia. And drugs used to treat the disease halt the growth of the parasite in lab dishes. In the rats above, when they got the drug they became properly alarmed by the smell of cats again. It seems as if stopping the parasite also stops the strange behavior.

It’s time to break the strings of our parasitical puppeteers.

rjb

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Dark Flow

Posted on 2013-01-11 by arjaybe

Dark Flow

Dark Flow

The known universe is about 27.4 billion light years across. It’s thought that the universe is bigger than that, possibly a lot bigger, but we can’t see farther than 13.7 billion light years in any direction. Our knowable universe is limited by the speed of light and how far it could travel since the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. Since light travels one light year per year, that limits us to a radius of 13.7 billion light years.

That’s pretty big. If it’s all we can see with no way to ever see beyond, who’s to say there is anything else? If we’re to be limited to this, admittedly enormous, bubble of space and time, is there any point in wondering if there’s anything else out there? Of course there is. Even if it’s impossibly out of reach we will reach for it. We humans, as soon as we’re shown our boundaries, will try to see beyond them.

Astronomers think they might have done just that. How do they infer that there is more to the universe than we can see? They do it by detecting its effect on what we can see. Two ways of doing that seem to show positive results. One is the motion of large swaths of galaxies and the other is a peculiar imbalance in the symmetry of space.

The flow of galaxies is called Dark Flow by some, in keeping with other great unknowns such as Dark Matter and Dark Energy. It was found in a survey of galaxy clusters, huge gravitationally bound congregations of hundreds or thousands of galaxies, in an area about two billion light years across. They all appear to be moving in the same direction at about a thousand kilometers per second. The implication of that much matter moving at high speed toward the same point is that there isn’t enough matter in the observable universe to account for the gravitational attraction required. It suggests huge concentrations of matter beyond the known universe drawing our galaxies away.

The peculiar asymmetry, the second effect, is found in the cosmic microwave background(CMB) radiation that fills space. The CMB is the cold, fading glow left over from the extreme heat of the Big Bang. It’s observed more or less evenly spread everywhere, with small fluctuations. In theory even the fluctuations should be evenly distributed, but they’re not. They’re about ten percent more numerous on one side of the sky than the other. This suggests that the observable universe’s structure is affected, distorted or sloped in some way, by other structures much larger than everything we can see.

The “whole” universe, of which our observable bubble is just a small part, would have to be very big. So much bigger that there wouldn’t be room in this article to write out how much bigger. It’s no wonder it affects the part we can observe.

rjb

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