[ExI] Sudden rise in enquiries for robot sex dolls

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> 
...

>...The backstory of two of Charles Stross's books is a world where the humans went extinct and the only characters left or former sex bots...Long ago Charles was on this list.  Keith

Hey Keith, Charlie is a buddy of yours, ja?  Wasn’t he at one of those SciFi writers parties at your house?  Where is he these days?  I haven’t heard from him in a long time, but I remember him as a pleasant lad, imaginative, mined the ExI chat for SciFi ideas and we were all cool with it.  He wasn't the only one doing that.  Neal Stephenson wrote ExI posters into Cryptonomicon as composite characters (I think.)

I have another thought experiment for you on the topic of the subject line.

Imagine taking all your favorite rock stars and recording artist, Google on their name and ask for the lyrics to their songs.  OK, now copy paste the lyrics into a spreadsheet, delimit it with spaces, and place all the words into a single column.  Do this for your top ten favorite musicians (and if you are into instrumental or classical, well, find some vocalists you like.)

OK now sort your list alphabetically, throw away the proper pronouns, the articles, the conjugations because we don't care about the ands, the as, the buts, the thes, we don't care about Maria from West Side Story.  (Well, actually we do (was Natalie Wood just smokin hot in that or what?))  

OK now, throw away all the words which appear only a few times in those words.  Johnny Mathis wrote: ...We have so much in common, It's a phenomenon...  Emmm, OK Johnny, I like the song and everything you ever did, but that is perhaps the only instance of the word "phenomenon" in pop music.  Likewise with the word "trigonometry" in Sam Cooke's Don't Know Much, probably the only instance in pop music, we don't care about those oddball words, so eliminate those.

OK now, count the word frequency and list the word only once.  If your 20 favorite artists list all their song lyrics, good chance the world "love" might show up seven hundred times, so replace those seven hundred with just love 700.  OK, now take the remaining list, toss everything that doesn't have at least, say 20 instances, and sort on the frequency column, with the most frequent words on the top.

How many words are on that list please?  Just guess at it is fine.  I would guess it is maybe 500-ish words.  If you take your 20 favorite artists, spill all their lyrics, sort by frequency and throw away any word that shows up less than 20 times, I think you would end up with maybe 500 words, and good chance love, lover, sweetheart, honey (etc) are close to the top of that list.  They cluster to the top of mine, because that list of 20 favorites include artists such as Stevie Wonder who wrote all those cool schmoozy oozy songs, Nat King Cole, John Denver, Karen Carpenter, and so on.  These are singers who loved love.  Everybody felt beautiful to Stevie Wonder.  Denver wrote all those songs about his feelings for Annie Denver and having children etc.  The reason we love these artists is that their songs are about what it feels like to be human.  

OK then, that was part one of this thought experiment.

Think that one over first, then I will post part two later, for it is even more fun.

spike