an extra day
G: This
week had leap day, last Friday. I celebrated by telling someone, "Happy
Leap Day."
I probably worked on the new game room, getting ready to finish up
painting it.
On Saturday I finished up almost all of the painting.
Then that night we went to a party at Tim and Lyana's, in celebration
of Luisa getting a work visa. So there were quite a few Greenbelters
and others from our circle of friends there. I had a lot of fun. I
actually hung out with, talked with, and played a game with Luisa. We
never seem to actually hang out at parties. So far every party I have
been to at Tim's has been loads of fun.
Sunday after yoga I went to the Community Center to be in my studio for
Artful Afternoon. I met our new studio mate. She was very friendly and
does awesome art. Check out Sherril
here!
After that I headed over to the Mayhews' to catch the end of Maren's
surprise 60th birthday party. I found out John had almost spoiled the
surprise by arriving just a few moments before Maren (he was on time
but they arrived early). As she came home from a brunch out with her
family, she saw John entering her house. Not realizing it was him, she
got all indignant about someone walking into their house uninvited.
Then when she came in, everyone was wearing masks made from pictures of
her throughout her life. Cute!
After coming home from that I put the finishing touches on the paint
job and finally decided to stop. It looks great!
measuring commonness
J: In
last
week's rant I showed how I found "reducible" words (words that
leave behind more words each time you remove a letter), and mentioned
that the twelve 10-letter reducible words seemed common to me, as words
go. But how do I determine how common they are?
In an effort to explore and measure commonness of words, I downloaded
the
Westbury
Lab list of 111,627 English Words and their frequencies (when used
in Usenet). I then took the top ranked 65,534 words (starting with
"the") and calculated their "percent commonness" like this:
%C = ((111,627 - R) / 111,627) * 100
Where R is the sequential order of the word in the list, the most
common word, "the" having a rank of 1 and %C of 100, going to
"derrieres" (which is kind of apropos) with a rank of 65534 and %C of
41. Now I have a list that I can check my reducible words against, to
reference relative commonness in a way that makes sense to me.
Without telling you what they are yet, the twelve 10-letter reducible
words in alphabetical order have %C of:
97%
97%
62%
47%
87%
68%
81% restarting (I already gave you that one)
61%
68%
54%
96%
64%
As you can see, all the words except one are more common than half the
words in the Westbury list, and three are in the top 5th percentile!