December 12 2022, 23:33

Finished reading “Endurance” by Alfred Lansing. A very interesting story, it reads in one breath. The only thing is that you need to gradually get used to the vocabulary, it’s unusual for an IT person.

And to illustrate, look at what a programmer does with my face in about 20 minutes. He downloads the book in EPUB format (only findable through Yandex on some pirate sites). Unzips the ZIP, finds HTML. Writes a quick script in python that splits the text into sentences, the sentences into words, and converts the words into their normal form (NLTK). Downloads a word frequency corpus from Keggle — 333K words with usage frequency. Then calculates two values for each sentence — the number of words and the number of rare words. Then in Excel, sorts the sentences not shorter than 10 words with a frequency below a certain threshold (500K). As a result, among the first results, we get a sentence that I even remember where I read in the book and just thought about it as something to post on Facebook as an illustration of the text’s complexity:

“…A vulgar person who often indulges in whoops and yells of ‘Yoicks Tally Ho,’ had the indescribable effrontery to let go his horrid war cry whilst riding on the imposing conveyance drawn by these dignified but nervous creatures, and was reproved by their indignant owner pointing out to the Vulgar Person into what terror his voice had thrown the beautiful but highly strung and delicate doggies. It is my painful duty to relate that this Awful Vulgar Person the very next day being out with an ordinary team gave vent to his fearsome bellow when passing the ‘Heart Disease’ Team. The result was disastrous, 2 of the poor creatures fainted and had to be brought round with hartshorn, etc., while the remainder went into hysterics until the Vulgar Person and his associates disappeared over the horizon.”

However, it should be noted that such complex text is not so frequent. These are excerpts from Frank Worsley’s diary. This sailor expresses thoughts quite unusually for a reader a hundred years later. The book itself, written from the perspective of an educated person and a 20th-century journalist, is relatively easy to read (again, you need to get used to the vocabulary, various maritime terms will have to be googled).