Communities on the 'Yahoo zodiac'

this new zodiac
differs from the old
'radial ontologies'
in that
the zodiac's 'stars'
are words and
strings of words

where the ontology postulated
ill-defined story-fragments

but they should map closely




now since every internet community
has its own favorite turns of phrase
they should each have a predominant 'sign'
on the zodiac



and someday no doubt
Google Trends
along with mapping places and times
of searches
will list the web communities
(slashdot, imdb, rigorous intuition)
that use each phrase
most often

Yahoo-betical order

my intuition is content
that our elastic wordsphere
is more-or-less unique
(barring, say,
mirror reflections,
and crossing fingers that
it would
fill
3D space
rather than aligning
down in 1- or 2-D)

and we can flatten it
along any chosen axis
so we choose whichever
offers the best separation
of the 14 Yahoo root-categories

and end up with a
canonical 'Yahoo zodiac'

as well as a very-fine-tuned
Yahoo-betical order
for all million words
based on their zero-to-360
radial angle




but this is just a temporary seed
a kludge to nudge our nodes
into a circle

so now we can cut that old elastic

momentarily locking words
at their Yahoo angle
but setting their distance
from the circlecenter
based on their frequency of
use

and now we add back in
word-pairs and threesomes, etc
attached by new elastics
to their component words and phrases

and with their orbits again
determined by the same metric
of frequencies of use

and one can hope these new elastics
when the strict Yahoobet is loosened
will enforce a pretty similar ordering

(words that shift radically
must have some
interesting
reason for doing so)

Math-quandary revisited

let's forget the circular orbits
for now

and start with the commonest word
(probably 'the')

and stretch a separate springy elastic
from 'the' to each other word

with the preferred length
determined by the observed average distance
between occurrences of these words
compared to the expected average distance
based on simple frequencies alone

so that pairs that tend to occur
closer together
will have shorter elastics
and pairs that occur farther apart
longer elastics

and we link every possible wordpair
by this metric
with the least likely pairs
linked by half-million-mile elastics
so the network as a whole
fills Moon's orbit

(not just the flat disk
but an orbit-sized sphere)

now
we can hope
the Yahoo clusters
will be well-separated in this space

and we can guess
the commonest words
will be pulled towards the center

and if we now
flatten the sphere

we ought
should
may
be able to
restore each word
to its frequency orbit
(most frequent closest
least frequent farthest)

without disrupting
the topical clustering...?

The idealism crushers

the previews for 'bully'
raise my hopes, a little
because they suggest a battle
(in the setting of a school)
between idealists
and idealism-crushers

which is a classic literary theme that's
so far
problematic for computer games

the classic/generic modern political novel
shows an idealist learning the ropes
and suffering infinite compromises

or via charm/luck/authorial-bad-faith
turning some corner of the tide

and the same for novels about journalists
and the same for novels about soldiers
and the same for novels about scientists
and the same for novels about educators
and the same for novels about artists
and the same for novels about social workers
etc etc etc

history offers few inspiring success stories

and computer game authors
resort to the same bad faith
to give idealism room to win

(can the political reformer ever hope
to knock on enough doors
to counteract the corporadoes'
swiftboat campaign?)

but in the miniaturised society
of a boarding school
surely one can knock on every door
and enlist fair-minded allies

Radial-ontologies math quandary

we arranged the million most-common words
alphabetically along the Moon's orbit

and added every possible word-group

and then we tightened each word/group's orbit
according to how common it is

and linked groups to component words
with imaginary elastic bands

and freed each word/group to slide
within its own orbit

speculating that the elastic
would pull words into groups
approximating the Yahoo toplevel categories:

Arts&Humanities, Business&Economy, Computers&Internet,
Education, Entertainment, Government, Health, News&Media,
Recreation&Sports, Reference, Regional, Science,
Social Science, Society

arranged somehow around the disk of orbits

but mathematically
the elastics would really just
clump everything into a tarball

so a subtler metric is needed

like

take the frequencies of any two words
and calculate the expected average distance
between occurrences of these words

calculate the actual average distance
(smaller for related words,
longer for unrelated)
and make the elastic 'repel'
when the distance is longer

but even then
the repulsion can act
'clockwise' or 'counterclockwise'

and it's not obvious how or whether
the collective force would neatly
optimally
fill the circle/orbits

so i want to virtually 'jiggle'
the system, with elastics
so that it finds its minimal energy state

(but is this realistic?)