Playing with words.

Tue, 29 Dec 2009
2 min read
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Finally – a slightly more personal post after so long! (Aaron Ho would be pleased.)

While I was in Bali, I worked on a short story when there wasn’t any sightseeing to be done. After finishing a draft of the story, however, I realised it read more like the Chapter One of a novella. That’s fine too, I guess, but I don’t know how long it’ll take me to finish writing that.

In any case, I’ve just finished tweaking the draft a bit and I thought I’d check if I’d used any words too many times. Apart from being a fun tool to play around with, Wordle helps quite a bit here.

The picture you see above is a word cloud of the story – the greater the number of times a word is used, the bigger the font size of the word in the cloud.

It seemed I used ‘around’ a bit too much as a preposition, so I modified some occurrences. ‘Toward’ has the next highest hit, but it’s harder to replace the word.

I’ll post the story/Chapter One up when I’m done getting feedback on it and editing it. Merry Christmas, everyone and have a Happy New Year!

Stuff you must read today (Sat, 26 Dec 2009)

Sun, 27 Dec 2009
1 min read
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Stuff you must read today (Thu, 24 Dec 2009)

Fri, 25 Dec 2009
2 min read
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  • Girls gone bad???

    • I quite agree that the report seems to be sensationalising matters quite a bit.

  • Why the female flirt is wasting her time

    • “…whatever the method of flirting it just doesn’t work with most men, claim researchers.

    The male brain, it seems, is hopeless at picking up “come-on” signals…. This leaves men impervious to the seduction techniques of the opposite sex.”

    Read the comments too as they provide a broader perspective of the argument. (via http://gssq.blogspot.com/2009/12/three-oclock-is-always-too-late-or-too.html )

  • The end of plenty.

    • “A growing workforce, Malthus explained, depresses wages, which tends to make people delay marriage until they can better support a family. Delaying marriage reduces fertility rates, creating an equally powerful check on populations.” – Sounds like Singapore.

  • Stone-age sex law hidden in plain sight

    • I agree with Yawning Bread in that:

    1. If the act was consensual, isn’t it unfair that the girl has not been charged as well? She has, after all, also been engaging in sex with an underage male.
    2. On that note, should we even be using the law on children in matters like these?
    3. On that note, ‘underage sex’ in a modern context seems like an archaic notion, IMHO, especially when it is consensual. Is this law even up to date then, to make allowance for consent to be brought into the picture?

  • What ‘Avatar’ taught me about cooking

    • “It just boils down to one word: Respect for your food. And being a bad cook is really just disrespectful, because it perverts what should have been tasty into something that is not.”