Hip-hop’s influence on the English language

For The New York Times, Miles Marshall Lewis highlights the etymology of five words in the English language heavily influenced by hip-hop: dope, woke, cake, wildin’, and ghost. A fun design using GIFs, images, and rotating discs you can click for music take you through the history.

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Objectiveness distributions

Putting this joke chart up for posterity, because it deserves it. The earliest version of this chart I could find was from 2019, but I’m almost certain it’s older than that. Please let me know if you know where the original is from.

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Demonstrating how large language models work

You might’ve heard about large language models lately. They’re the “brains” behind recent chatbots that seem to know an awful lot. Aatish Bhatia, for NYT’s The Upshot, walks you through how such a model “learns” to write based on a relatively small body of text.

There’s a little bit of Choose Your Own Adventure mixed in, so you can select the type of text. Bhatia used nanoGPT, an open source library, to model Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

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Developing a data design language for the World Health Organization

In a collaborative effort with UX agency Kore, Moritz Stefaner describes work with World Health Organization to develop a data design language for their evolving data collections:

Deliberately designed as a toolbox, rather than a “rule book”, the Data Design Language includes not only principles and guidelines, but also a corresponding design vocabulary and repertoire — for instance, downloadable styles for color and typography, exemplary chart designs, as well as clear specifications for achieving high levels of responsiveness, interaction, internationalization and accessibility.

A custom chart library constitutes the reference implementation for the language and its principles. A corresponding chart creation tool will make it very easy for editors to effortlessly create and publish excellent charts.

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Analysis of compound curse words used on Reddit

As you know, Reddit is typically a sophisticated place of kind and pleasant conversation. So Colin Morris analyzed the usage of compound pejoratives in Reddit comments:

The full “matrix” of combinations is surprisingly dense. Of the ~4,800 possible compounds, more than half occurred in at least one comment. The most frequent compound, dumbass, appears in 3.6 million comments, but there’s also a long tail of many rare terms, including 444 hapax legomena (terms which appear only once in the dataset), such as pukebird, fartrag, sleazenozzle, and bastardbucket.

Stay classy.

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Different languages, but similar information rates

Christophe Coupé and company analyzed speech rate (on the left) across different languages, and then compared it to information rate (on the right) in bits per second. While speech rate and information rate are still coupled, there’s less variation in information rate across languages. More syllables doesn’t necessarily mean more information.

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Isotype, a picture language

Jason Forrest delves into the history of a single Isotype and a bit of the general background on the picture language:

Isotype is a highly refined picture language designed for educating people with as few words as possible. Created by Otto Neurath in 1925, the International System of Typographic Picture Education (ISOTyPE) evolved over the next two decades with the collaboration of Marie Neurath and Gerd Arntz. The trio developed their distinct approach to data visualization iteratively, and very collaboratively. Otto provided the overall direction, Marie “transformed” the data to present the story, and Gerd designed the pictogram units and highly-refined designs.

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Why some Asian accents swap Ls and Rs

Vox delves into why Ls and Rs often get replaced by Asian speakers using English as a second language. Some sounds aren’t prevalent in other languages, and it’s not the same across all Asian languages.

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Changing size analogies and the trends of everyday things

When you try to describe the size of something but don’t have an exact measurement, you probably compare it to an everyday object that others can relate to. Using the Google Books Ngram dataset, Colin Morris looked for how such comparisons changed over the past few centuries.

I especially like the bits of history to explain why some words fell into and out of fashion.

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Dialect book of maps

Speaking American Book

In 2013, Josh Katz put together a dialect quiz that showed where people talk like you, based on your own vocabulary. Things like coke versus soda. It’s a fine example of how we’re often talking about the same thing but say or express it differently. Speaking American is the book version of the dialect quiz results.

It’s a fun coffee/kitchen table book to flip through casually. It’s not just a book maps. It’s a highlight of the interesting bits and provides some short explanations for why the differences exist. I’ve been enjoying bits and pieces on the occasion my son takes an unreasonable amount of time to finish his dinner.

Get it on Amazon.

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