Month: March 2001

Link: Computing’s Unfinished Revolution

Link broken? Try the Wayback Machine.… Read the rest

Most of the words in the English language are greatly underutilized. Words like fracas and sanguine and superlative don’t pop up nearly as often as simpler words like book or car or the. This simple observation has a name: It’s called Zipf’s Law, named for an obscure linguistics professor, George Kingsley Zipf, who noticed this pattern around the turn of the century.… Read the rest