Monday 6 May 2002

Fun With Your Zip Program: Sort Through Texts, and More. Physicists have figured out how to use zipping programs to analyze and categorize text quickly, which could lead to a system for ordering DNA and protein sequences. By Bruce Schechter. [New York Times: Science] Another example of interdisciplinary studies, though linguistics is used to quantitative methods. It’s funny how trees redound through this whole thing. Compression is generally done with trees, so all they’re doing is being more general about the process of constructing linguistic family trees. Rather, they take a top-down approach rather than the bottom-up approach (comparing word morphologies & cetera). 7:27:15 PM    comment [] Here’s an article on the economic analysis of art. What he says about the classes of artists seems to echo something that poets have tried to articulate about themselves, how some, such as Robert Lowell and Rich, make their greatest poems in their early careers then successively churn out more and more workmanlike pieces; while others hone and hone their craft, such as Justice and Merrill. I pride myself in being a generalist, but it never ever occurred to me to apply the statistical techniques I learned to the history of poetry. Maybe I should not have said that about Rich. 3:28:07 AM    comment []

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