funny stuff. I was getting Arthur Clarke for space related topics, and Edgar Allen Poe and Lovecraft for political topics. how creepily fitting.
Well, politics is rather a horror story these days. Makes sense.
I keep getting Arthur Clarke. I had some fun with it, and entered Robert Heinlein’s “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” into the analyzer. Apparently Heinlein writes like Cory Doctorow.
Apparently Heinlein writes like Cory Doctorow.
Hilarious. “Being intelligent is not a felony, but most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor” produces Daniel Defoe.
I got multiple different authors for different blog posts, including Lovecraft and David Foster Wallace (?) a couple of times, but also including Poe, Asimov, and Dan Brown.
BBB
This thing is a scam. Note the link to the vanity press service.
I write like Clarke and Vonnegut. Yeah, I always get those two confused too. 🙂
Lovecraft for advocacy writing and Clarke for technical topics.
Apparently Cthulhu is no longer dreaming in R’lyeh.
Three consecutive chapters from the same book, and I got three different results. I saw it about a week ago. It’s a scam but all over the net now.
I ran the abstracts from my two most recent pieces of engineeringc writing, and they each came back at Grade 18, Ease of Reading 25/100.
I ran my most recent comments-thread post (on another blog), which came up Grade 12, Ease of Reading 55/100. I ran it on the comment entry I was responding to, both comments were on a technical subject, but the fellow in question has the HABIT of doing THIS to make HIS POINT, which came up Grade 6, Ease of Reading 85/100.
So Rand, I take back what I said about fellow participants around here using all-caps to drive home a point. The tool in question suggests that is easier to read.
So there is an inverse relationship between grade level and readability. Makes sense.
I can’t seem to leave a response on this one. But if I could, it would be: “Wgah’nagl fhtagn, y’all!”
I write like Dan Brown??? NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
This is the text that produced that result:
Many anti-unionists perceive that the unions are simply protecting the underperformers. That may be the case, but I think there’s more to the story. Perhaps the unionists perceive that a performance-based factor would be so great as to render the very concept of collective bargaining meaningless. (Especially if you start docking the underperformers’ pay.) Perhaps unionists tend to share a perverse sort of egalitarian ethic that sees performance-based salary stratification as “elitist.”
Let’s try that again…heh, each of these samples points to Kurt Vonnegut:
I never ever want to see another Bush in the White House. I don’t care if it’s Jeb, George P., Barbara, Jenna, or Kate. I don’t even want Nunn Bush shoes worn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The name “Bush” will always evoke memories of pandering to the Democrats on taxes (Bush 41) or spending (Bush 43).
I say we take a cue from Hollywoodland and have a televised contest – have nations compete for ownership of Gaza. To qualify for entry, nations should meet certain standards for entry, including but not limited to: representative democracy, independent judiciary, trial by jury, a certain degree of speech, press and religious freedoms, strong property rights, government reasonably secure against insurgency, government more solvent than that of Greece, government does not harbor terrorists, government supports Israel’s right to exist.
I also write like Bob Gaskins. No, he’s not in the quiz. He invented PowerPoint – I like to bullet-point my bloggage now and then.
Wes: I like that tool. I tried it on the Heinlein quote above and got average grade 15 and reading ease of 36.
So, what should NASA be doing, beyond just developing those enabling technologies? If they are going to go about doing the Vision for Space Exploration, then what is the better way to do it?
The solution is to decouple the mission from the implementation. It matters that it gets done, not that NASA does it or that the agency does it in a specific carved-in-stone way. NASA can’t do it all by itself anymore, so it shouldn’t even try. No more of this business of NASA building their own brand new launch vehicles and their own brand new manned capsules and their own brand new moon landers and their own brand new moonbases and micromanaging every detail. It is a brittle way of doing things, and the slightest hiccup in the yearly budget process or the slightest failure along that critical path brings everything to a screeching halt.
The results were average grade 11 and 60 reading ease. Simple enough for even a congressman to understand.
I have no idea how the boldface ended up in there.
When I first ran across the readability index I was writing at the 7th to 8th grade level and could usually be understood. I developed my talents until I could reliably achieve results such as this selection from a three paragraph entry:
“In order to provide access to the layperson, the hypothetical non-specialist scholar/everyman, I have chosen, in this particular compendium of primary trends in “precognitive” educational, or more precisely learner-centric research, to simplify conceptually, (perhaps to the point of parody, though I leave that, as is proper, for the reader to decide), many of the underlying components and perceptual concepts, though let us hope not to a level whereby veracity not only suffers inordinately, but perishes due to a misplaced lack of rigor and self-induced, neoclassical structural incoherence.”
Average Readability Level: 30.72
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease -38.6
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level -32.9
Gunning-Fog Score -36
Coleman-Liau Index -22.1
SMOG Index -25.1
Automated Readability Index -37.5
Good thing it’s a scam, else I write like Cory Doctorow. 🙂
As a very off-topic discovery (but relevant to other discussions we have especially current economic policy and climate “change”), I used a rant in which I support a DARPA betting market project that would have betted on the likelihood of things like major foreign policy events (eg, regime changes). Through the magic of chasing links from that rant, I ended up reading a nasty attack by Joseph Stiglitz who apparently is notorious for supplying ideological ammunition to oppose free markets.
His most recent project was chairing a UN commission to determine the amount of economic guilt to assess to wealthy nations.
This is yet another example of ideology driving the science, so to speak. I doubt Stiglitz would have been allowed anywhere near a UN panel, unless he had a suitable ideological outlook and a history of catering to the needs of socialist politicians and related ilk.
funny stuff. I was getting Arthur Clarke for space related topics, and Edgar Allen Poe and Lovecraft for political topics. how creepily fitting.
Well, politics is rather a horror story these days. Makes sense.
I keep getting Arthur Clarke. I had some fun with it, and entered Robert Heinlein’s “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” into the analyzer. Apparently Heinlein writes like Cory Doctorow.
Apparently Heinlein writes like Cory Doctorow.
Hilarious. “Being intelligent is not a felony, but most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor” produces Daniel Defoe.
I got multiple different authors for different blog posts, including Lovecraft and David Foster Wallace (?) a couple of times, but also including Poe, Asimov, and Dan Brown.
BBB
This thing is a scam. Note the link to the vanity press service.
I write like Clarke and Vonnegut. Yeah, I always get those two confused too. 🙂
Lovecraft for advocacy writing and Clarke for technical topics.
Apparently Cthulhu is no longer dreaming in R’lyeh.
Three consecutive chapters from the same book, and I got three different results. I saw it about a week ago. It’s a scam but all over the net now.
This link is pretty cool for testing the grade level you write at and not even a scam — http://www.addedbytes.com/code/readability-score/
Wes: Neat tool.
I ran the abstracts from my two most recent pieces of engineeringc writing, and they each came back at Grade 18, Ease of Reading 25/100.
I ran my most recent comments-thread post (on another blog), which came up Grade 12, Ease of Reading 55/100. I ran it on the comment entry I was responding to, both comments were on a technical subject, but the fellow in question has the HABIT of doing THIS to make HIS POINT, which came up Grade 6, Ease of Reading 85/100.
So Rand, I take back what I said about fellow participants around here using all-caps to drive home a point. The tool in question suggests that is easier to read.
So there is an inverse relationship between grade level and readability. Makes sense.
I can’t seem to leave a response on this one. But if I could, it would be: “Wgah’nagl fhtagn, y’all!”
I write like Dan Brown??? NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
This is the text that produced that result:
Let’s try that again…heh, each of these samples points to Kurt Vonnegut:
I also write like Bob Gaskins. No, he’s not in the quiz. He invented PowerPoint – I like to bullet-point my bloggage now and then.
Wes: I like that tool. I tried it on the Heinlein quote above and got average grade 15 and reading ease of 36.
Then I tried it on something I wrote three years ago:
The results were average grade 11 and 60 reading ease. Simple enough for even a congressman to understand.
I have no idea how the boldface ended up in there.
When I first ran across the readability index I was writing at the 7th to 8th grade level and could usually be understood. I developed my talents until I could reliably achieve results such as this selection from a three paragraph entry:
“In order to provide access to the layperson, the hypothetical non-specialist scholar/everyman, I have chosen, in this particular compendium of primary trends in “precognitive” educational, or more precisely learner-centric research, to simplify conceptually, (perhaps to the point of parody, though I leave that, as is proper, for the reader to decide), many of the underlying components and perceptual concepts, though let us hope not to a level whereby veracity not only suffers inordinately, but perishes due to a misplaced lack of rigor and self-induced, neoclassical structural incoherence.”
Average Readability Level: 30.72
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease -38.6
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level -32.9
Gunning-Fog Score -36
Coleman-Liau Index -22.1
SMOG Index -25.1
Automated Readability Index -37.5
Good thing it’s a scam, else I write like Cory Doctorow. 🙂
As a very off-topic discovery (but relevant to other discussions we have especially current economic policy and climate “change”), I used a rant in which I support a DARPA betting market project that would have betted on the likelihood of things like major foreign policy events (eg, regime changes). Through the magic of chasing links from that rant, I ended up reading a nasty attack by Joseph Stiglitz who apparently is notorious for supplying ideological ammunition to oppose free markets.
His most recent project was chairing a UN commission to determine the amount of economic guilt to assess to wealthy nations.
This is yet another example of ideology driving the science, so to speak. I doubt Stiglitz would have been allowed anywhere near a UN panel, unless he had a suitable ideological outlook and a history of catering to the needs of socialist politicians and related ilk.