physorg.com — Zipf’s law is a testament to the order in our world, showing that the same patterns emerge in a wide variety of situations. The linguist George Kingsley Zipf first proposed the law in 1949, when he noticed that the distribution of words in a newspaper, book, or other literary article always followed the same pattern.
Dec 1, 2008 View in Crawl 4
rapaxDec 2, 2008
This got me thinking about how using, or deliberately avoiding, Zipf may be a useful tool. If most literary works follow Zipfs law, then it stands to reason that we're used to reading text that follows Zipf. So if you write something that deliberately breaks that law, for instance by doing a Zipf analysis, then replacing common words with synonyms just enough to flatten out the distribution, it would probably register in the subconscious of the reader as being 'slightly off'. Maybe this could be a useful tactic when you want your text to stand out from a bunch of essentially identical texts, e. g. in a job application.
nickpickDec 2, 2008
Good to have an interesting article in the Linux section for a change.
asgardshillDec 2, 2008
This means Zipf to me - buried.
orlyfactorDec 2, 2008
Do this one...for the Zipper!
djfangDec 2, 2008
This is intriguing. This is exciting as open source software allows for collaboration and this will only increase exponentially as we become more interconnected. Great achievements will be made across the spectrum but since people are working together, this may be bad too. There are those tht may be discouraged due to the lack of recognition/incentive.
yahoofromDec 3, 2008
Zipf's law is like normal distribution! it's everywhere!
charlesw1970Oct 30, 2009
so in short, randomness is not random?