[extropy-chat] Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases

[Hal Finney]

It sounds like something out of Hitchhiker's Guide or one of Banks'
Culture ship names, but Amazon has an amusing new feature called
Statistically Improbable Phrases or SIPs.  These are displayed with books
for which the text is available with their "search inside the book"
feature.  According to the explanation, Amazon locates phrases which
occur much more frequently than average within the book.  Sometimes they
give a hint of the flavor of the book beyond the reviews and comments.

For Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep, the SIPs are: coldsleep boxes, radio
cloaks, her dataset, his fronds, voder voice, drive spines, cargo shell,
flying house, command deck, refugee ship, scarred one, inner keep, alien
member, other hull, single pack, zero gee, most packs.  Seems like kind
of weird choices: command deck? refugee ship?  Would they really be
that rare?  And where are "Straumli perversion", or "zones of thought",
key phrases that drove the entire structure of the book?

Let's try some nonfiction, Drexler's Engines of Creation: cell repair
machines, millionfold faster, limited assemblers, sealed assembler labs,
cell repair technology, cooperating democracies, dangerous replicators,
replicating assemblers, automated engineering, assembler arm, mental
immune system, mechanical nanocomputers, active shields, duck genes,
bulk technology, meme systems, fact forums, protein machines, coming
breakthroughs, assembler systems, design ahead, sealed labs, material
entropy, molecular machines, neural simulation.  That's not too bad,
although I don't know where the duck genes came from.

Anyway it's an interesting concept, mostly kind of fun to use it on
books you haven't read in a while to give you a nostalgic reminder of
what they were like.

Hal