dagblog - Comments for "In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture"

Not really sure I am negative

EmmaZahn — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 07:41:26 +0000

In reply to Emma & Quinn,OIC, from your

Not really sure I am negative about Google's new toy. Even before the internets, I would get lost in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and just about any other sort of reference for hours as whatever I looked up led to anywhere from 10s-100s other things. The internet only speeded that up.

It is transhumanism that worries me. We haven't even figured out how to be human yet!

Emma & Quinn,OIC, from your

artappraiser — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 05:52:21 +0000

In reply to In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture

Emma & Quinn,

OIC, from your examples, it appears as dangerous as I feared from the article, thanks for being the guinea pigs, I'm going to have to put such new addiction possiblities on hold for a couple weeks. .

P.S. Emma, I'm not so negative on the import, IF people use it to get ideas for further research, i.e., is this result a clue to something happening? Not if they use it the other way around, i.e., as proof of some theory or other. Of course, that wouldn't apply to linguists/etymologists, they must be in the clover with this.

Here's

EmmaZahn — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:24:04 +0000

In reply to http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

Here's another:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=neologism%2Cbabel&year_start=0&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

quinn esq — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:06:33 +0000

In reply to Not sure whether to rejoice

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=transhumanism%2Cart+appraiser...

Not sure whether to rejoice

EmmaZahn — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 20:57:43 +0000

In reply to In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture

Not sure whether to rejoice or lament.

That all that hard-earned human knowledge can be accessed by a computer in picoseconds is kind of frightening. I had not decided whether or not to welcome transhumanism and it is already here.

Requires more thinking. Thanks, I think.