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9:06 PM
This is supposedly real.
 
0
Q: What is the Relationship Between Document Length and Unique Words

demongolemSorry if my question is a little more mathematical in nature, but my question is: Suppose I took a document of some length whether it be news article, book, or something of that sort. What sort of relationship would I expect between the document's length and the number of unique words contained...

Belongs on Linguistics.SE
That fuzzy blob in the middle is a galaxy bigger than the Milky Way. The supermassive black hole in the center is sending out those ballooning gas clouds.
The black hole itself is supposedly some 2.5 billion solar masses in size.
 
I don't see the black hole.
 
@Cerberus you can't see a black hole, it's black
 
If it isn't Mr Obvious!
Welcome!
 
That's Mr. Obvious and New 安宇 to you
 
9:20 PM
Or Mrs Obvious etc.
 
but it's actually true though. you see things because light bounces off them and reach your eyes. but light can't bounce off a black hole.
 
You don't say.
It's not even true, actually.
You see the sun because it directly emits light, not because it reflects it.
 
@Cerberus well, black holes don't directly emit light.
 
That's how a gas can be seen.
Because not enough light can reflect on gas.
 
gasses can reflect light too
 
9:23 PM
Not enough.
 
depends on the circumstances
 
a) hawking radiation and b) quasars. so there, black holes do radiate
 
Besides, most of the things in the picture probably neither emit nor reflect visible light.
They just colour the picture.
@MattЭллен But light?
 
@Cerberus from quasars
I think
 
Um.
A quasar is not a black hole, is it?
 
9:24 PM
yes, it's a black hole
 
quasars surround black holes
 
Comme ça.
Voilà un quasar.
Eh ! c'est pas mal.
 
> Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections “has become a black hole” because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud “Excuse me!” He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a “white hole.”

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.
 
I guess by that logic Notorious B.I.G. was a supermassive black hole.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 But seriously ... FOX News aired this? They took time out from decrying the War on Christmas to make fun of a black guy who didn't know something about science? But they don't believe in science either. It ain't Christian.
 
9:35 PM
fuck that guy's annoying
 
> Do things get lost in a White Hole? I'm gonna tell you the same thing: Why's it gotta get lost in a Black Hole? Why didn't it get lost in a Brown Hole? Oooh, because some scientist said it? Is that the reason? I mean, I wonder what colour were those scientists..."
@Robusto well, it's from a few years back.
Anyway, time for me to go.
 
CYA
 
CMYK
 
9:40 PM
Let me take you to the Y M C K
 
Veiled black humor. You said K, you racist.
 
lucky I didn't say KKK
 
That's equivalent to #000 in CSS.
 
Yeah, and we're saying black is 0. We're racists.
#FFF is pure as the driven snow, by all that is holy.
 
9:43 PM
FFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
 
U is not hexadecimal. I don't know what it is, but it ain't that.
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Wow.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Nooo this has got to be a joke?
 
BAI
 
Bai.
 
9:59 PM
The enemy of the platypus is man.
 
The hawk drinks from the goldfish bowl
 
Oh! Is it that late already?
I need some motivation to revise my book.
We're having a platypus themed dinner.
 
I'm going to come back to mine probably next year
 
Those statements are not related.
 
book, not dinner
How are you making a platypus themed dinner?
 
10:01 PM
Phineas and Ferb shaped mac and cheese.
And Phineas and Ferb on the blinkbox.
So it's not really platypus themed except that I just said so.
My husband is off to Boston tonight.
 
oh no!
for how long?
 
Just tonight.
And tomorrow.
 
good good
 
He's going to watch football with his brother tonight.
 
> Marijuana for recreational use became legal in Colorado today, when the governor took the procedural step of declaring the voter-approved change part of the state constitution.
That just happened.
 
10:06 PM
good good
 
Hey, @Mahnax!
 
@KitFox important game, or just to hang out?
 
> Hickenlooper, a Democrat, opposed the measure but had no veto power over the voter-approved amendment to the state constitution. He tweeted his declaration Monday and sent an executive order to reporters by email after the fact. That prevented a countdown to legalization as seen in Washington, where the law’s supporters gathered to smoke in public.
 
@KitFox Hi!
 
So we have governors tweeting such things now. Hm.
 
10:06 PM
@MattЭллен Well, local team. The Patriots. The Monday night game is something special apparently.
@Mahnax Did you post your story somewhere for us to read?
 
@KitFox Oh, never! It's awful.
 
Um, so is mine.
 
@Mahnax lol. that's not important. what's important is having other people read it and tell you they like it
 
Oh shit.
 
10:08 PM
@Matt, I liked your story.
 
@KitFox, I liked yours too!
 
sighs
Now I can't believe you.
But the revised version is gonna be awesome!
 
awww, but you can! What I said should be read as "You think your story is awful, but really that just self consciousness. Let other people read it and tell you what they think, because that will raise your impression of it."
 
I will do my best to read both of your stories sometime.
Unfortunately, I've been horrifically busy, what with my new job and all.
 
New job?
 
10:11 PM
Oh, yes! I work at Starbucks now.
Have for a week, in fact.
 
Nice. I hope you learn to make perfect espresso shots.
 
Time for me to ride the sleigh. CU! Don't smoke too much pot in Colorado.
 
Bye!
Then I'll hire you to work for me when I open my coffee shop.
 
Oh, I'd love to!
 
You'd love to work in a backwater town serving coffee?
 
10:16 PM
@Kit, do you think Linguistics might accept this?
2
Q: What is the Relationship Between Document Length and Unique Words

demongolemSorry if my question is a little more mathematical in nature, but my question is: Suppose I took a document of some length whether it be news article, book, or something of that sort. What sort of relationship would I expect between the document's length and the number of unique words contained...

 
Well, not really. . .
 
@Mahnax I thought you were more ambitious than that.
 
But it would probably be fun to work in a locally owned coffeeshop run by you.
 
I don’t know whether they talk about TF/IDF and all that jazz over there, but we sure don’t do much of it here.
 
I don't think so @tchrist, but I'll ask around.
 
10:18 PM
Ok, thanks. I get the idea there is no real NLP/CL home at SE.
The alternative would be to fix it up into an SO question, but those almost never get much attention.
 
I don't know what those things mean.
 
NLP = Natural Language Processing
CL = Computational Linguistics
You can see how much attention the NLP tag doesn’t get at SO here.
 
Doesn't strike me as an SO kind of question.
 
It’s got 1783 questions, but still.
It isn’t general linguistics, either.
Well, maybe it is.
Those SO questions aren’t too terribly far off from their question.
I think I will poke around at them a bit and see whether it comes up.
 
I wonder if it might go on Cross Validated.
 
10:21 PM
Stats?
 
Well, it's kind of document statistics.
 
Well, sure.
It is a well-defined question: "What sort of relationship would I expect between the document's length and the number of unique words contained in it?"
Or at least, has a discrete wording.
 
I would not close it on Linguistics.
 
You wouldn't close it on any site.
 
Heh. :)
I would have thought it followed a Zipfian distribution.
 
10:24 PM
Someone else mentioned that, I think.
Anyway, I asked.
 
Ok, thank you.
 
There will be a rather weak correlation, I think.
Genre is far more important.
Dictionaries win hands down.
 
Most of those mods are European, so it probably won't be settled until tomorrow.
 
Barefoot through the snow.
Which mods?
 
The stats site has a zipf tag.
No, not anymore. Odd.
It used to, per Google.
According to this, most Zipf questions are on stats, but a fair number are on math.
@Kit You’re looking rightier and rightier.
4
Q: At what n do n-grams become counterproductive?

jonscaWhen doing natural language processing, one can take a corpus and evaluate the probability of the next word occurring in a sequence of n. n is usually chosen as 2 or 3 (bigrams and trigrams). Is there a known point at which tracking the data for the nth chain becomes counterproductive, given ...

 
10:32 PM
> ... large companies like Google and Apple both spent more last year on patents than they did on actual research and development.
 
10:46 PM
Hey, For the sentence: Keep calm and buy an XMAS gram. Isn't the an supposed to be an 'a'?
 
That depends on how you pronounce it.
If you pronounce it like Christmas, use a; if like X-mas, use an.
Most people would most probably pronounce it like Christmas here.
 
11:05 PM
> There's a curious quirk on every official North Korean website. A piece of programming that must be included in each page's code. Its function is straightforward but important. Whenever leader Kim Jong-un is mentioned, his name is automatically displayed ever so slightly bigger than the text around it. Not by much, but just enough to make it stand out.
Wow, the BBC sucks at spelling.
> Of the three-year old, Five Star Movement itself, Mr Vignaroli said, "It's changed a lot.
The Five-Star Movement is an Italian political party.
So it would have to be the three-year-old Five-Star Movement.
How hard was that?
 
11:51 PM
@tchrist sigh
 
@cornbreadninja ?
 
@tchrist it was a dreamy sigh.
 
That sounds less bad.
 
Quick, you have five minutes to spend your delete-votes on Nortynesses.
Unless you already have. :)
 
11:55 PM
I tried to think of a process that would take some significant amount of time so I timed grep -wn 'Alice' alice.txt, that file being Alice In Wonderland.
@tchrist I deleted some things.
 
Thanks.
That grep won’t take long.
 

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