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Musical Manuscripts
Nature recently featured this article detailing a new set of studies that claim musical notes in a song are statistically very similar to words in a book. The article mentions this helps explain why most people have such a hard time understanding atonal music. However, I also think this could provide some insight as to why prodigies seem to always concentrate in language, music, and mathematics.
I read this as "MUSICAL HANDCUFFS" and thought how romantic and kinky!
Then again, I'm still hopped up on novacaine and white wine.
Posted by: maru on June 22, 2004 07:37 PMWOO HOO! You & I should party some day. :)
Posted by: Scott on June 22, 2004 07:43 PM"In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency. In other words, a graph of one plotted against the other appeared as a straight line."
So a quantity's inverse plotted against that quantity gives a straight line. Gee, what a shocker. I think that sounds like slope (give or take a minus sign).
Posted by: Sherri on June 25, 2004 11:29 AM