Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

I spent most of July offline, travelling, for the most part in Ladakh. It’s hard to miss the internet in a place like this:

At the confluence of the Indus and the Zanskar.

The experience was so relieving that I’m considering spending a few more months doing this – travelling and staying offline.

To prepare our next analysis, I parsed the Evolution page’s entire revision history for individual words added and removed. The first available revision is from December 3, 2001, making that just about seven and a half years worth of revisions.

Here’s the raw data file, 4.8 MB bzipped, expanding to 76.4 MB. Content format: UTC Timestamp, Revision Id, User, Add/AddStems/Del/DelStems, List of words…

The data includes both words and their stems. The stems are calculated using the Porter stemmer, without semantic context (background reading). Letter case has been preserved since I have no means to distinguish between proper nouns and sentence-beginning capitalisation. To get the list of words, I start with the article’s raw text, strip it of HTML tags, tokenise it by alphanumeric characters to get a stream of words, and then diff that against the previous revision’s word stream (the same algorithm as diff -u on the command line). A displaced word will thereby show up as both added and deleted. The tokeniser isn’t perfect: the word “isn’t” will be broken up into “isn” and “t” since the apostrophe doesn’t count as alphanumeric. Suggestions on how to make a better one appreciated.

Here’s the code if you’d like to try this yourself. You’ll need the other modules in the folder, the NLTK library, and the mwclient library.

Analysis to follow.

If you release a litre of water into the vacuum of outer space, what will happen to it?

It will vapourise instantly, just as a compressed aerosol at Earth surface pressure, and in the process cool down far below freezing point. What happens to the molecules then?

Do they float away as free molecules, no longer ice? Does the crystalline structure of the ice hold them solid? Or if that is too late or not strong enough, does gravitational attraction pull them back together? Will Earth’s own gravitational pull be strong enough to bring them down?

I’ve posted some pictures from last month’s discussion on using social media for mobilisation, with Dina Mehta and Peter Griffin at CIS. Here’s the report and earlier Twitter feed.

Nothing significant; just some faces. Helping with attaching names to faces appreciated.