YOUR KINDLE NOTES FOR: Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture
by Erez Aiden, Jean-Baptiste Michel
Free Kindle instant preview: http://a.co/b3Dc0kB
23 Highlights | 10 Notes
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 27
For instance, beautiful appears twenty-nine times. Intelligent? Only once.
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 28
You would think that by alphabetizing a romance novel, and thereby obliterating its meaning, Reimer would also eliminate everything that made the novel interesting.
must read!
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 28
The thought of reading millions of books in a split second hadn’t entered our minds.
who would think ?
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 35
But as we’ve seen, the world of words is far from normal, with a distribution of sizes that obeys a very specific, and seemingly strange, mathematical pattern.
some things are not distributed like a bellshaped curve
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 35
If your height were proportional to your bank account, and the average American household were five-foot- seven, then Bill Gates would be taller than the moon.
Gates is different
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 38
I may have never heard of flamboozing before, but I know that if you chose to flambooze yesterday, then yesterday you flamboozed.
add "ed"
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 40
For every sneak that snuck in, there are many more flews that flied out.
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 47
A rule is the tombstone of a thousand exceptions.
wonderful book on language
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 82
It lacked a comprehensive card catalog for the works that occupy its fifty-two miles of shelf space.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 82
Finding a book was a matter of knowing someone who knew someone who knew (or thought they knew) where the book was.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 83
But it turns out that card catalogs, even the best ones, are riddled with errors.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 83
According to our initial calculations, our friend in the office next door had enjoyed a surge in popularity during the sixteenth century. When we confronted her about this, she denied being that old.
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 92
If we want to understand fame, what we need is a wind tunnel.
surprising
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 97
She is more phamous than she is famous.
measure v. reality
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 115
But if you want to become famous, the worst possible thing to do is what we did: to pursue mathematics.
oh, no!
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 137
A few years after he guided the Russian Revolution that established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Lenin suffered a stroke that compromised his ability to lead.
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 159
This sort of memory-by-association effect is a major problem: It’s impossible to account for and impossible to predict.
our thinking is unpredictable
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 163
the half-life of collective forgetting.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 164
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, for example, what we now call snail mail used to arrive as often as fifteen times a day.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 178
By the meeting’s end, we realized that what we thought were our most interesting findings were boring in comparison to the latest eye-opener.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 179
Now, you would think librarians are the quiet type. That was not our experience.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 181
Mother Jones hailed it as “perhaps the greatest timewaster in the history of the Internet.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 195
Our civilization tweets more words every hour than can be found in all the surviving texts of ancient Greece.