Getting Graphic #16: More Power!

Continuing with power law stuff.

Getting uncomfortably public about addiction, mental health, substance abuse, and other random stuff through unfiltered stream-of-consciousness writing [is that redundant?]. Subscribe here:

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Introductory Remarks

Dear Zesters,

In Wednesday’s post, Controllables & Non-Negotiables, I described two pretty basic concepts that are pretty fundamental my personal wellness-maintenance routines, that I think I’ve kind of thoughtfully developed over the past like 5 years or so. I don’t think that I wrote anything particularly insightful but it was also a bit more thoughtful, like in aggregate, than many of my other posts. So, all in all, I’ll take it! Onward we march.

Inspirational Zipf

So basically I’ve spoken at some length by now about how I eventually want to submit the entire corpus of Infinite Zest to text analysis techniques that I learned in college. Specifically, I aim to: (1) assess the emotional composition of my material over time to see if we can discern improvement and/or patterns, and (2) to see if it adheres to Zipf’s Law. And so as part of that eventual fun, which I promise I’m 100% committed to, I figured I’d continue with my exploration of how Zipf’s Law manifests itself in the world. Here I’m stealing a graph from some other random person from reddit who did this type of analysis for his blog. And:

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So there you can see a nice and tidy definition of Zipf’s Law right at the top, which, for ease of reading, says:

Zipf’s Law states that for any given language, the most common word will occur twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common word, and so on.

So that’s what this kind person is modeling out for us. You can see that “the” is the most frequent word by a long shot, followed by “a,” “to,” “of,” and “and.” What’s interesting is the fact that it doesn’t adhere perfectly to Zipf’s Law, but it is pretty damn close. Fun!

The only other thing I’ll quickly mention is how whack it is that this person’s 16th most frequent word is “Proto” and 23rd is “Indo” and 24th is “European,” like, get a life, bro. Any who..!

Concluding Remarks

I really am excited to one day analyze my own corpus of posts—and I really promise you that I will get around to it eventually—I’m just truthfully not as well-equipped to conduct that analysis as I thought I was. But, we will persevere. Okay have a beautiful wonderful amazing weekend! Spread love and joy! And go Steelers!

With infinite zest for life,

Luke