wow. I just discovered Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrase feature. It culls the phrases from the text that stand out in a particular book. This is a genius idea twith seemingly little purpose. It looks like at this point there is a limited number of books with this capability.
Some fun SIPs I found, for example:
* One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest : least black boy, bull goose loony, day room door, big black boys
* Tropic of Capricorn: sour rye, stiff prick, limburger cheese, little dough
* Catch 22: bloated colonel, tighter bomb pattern, big fat mustache, eggs for seven cents, intelligence tent
* Cryptonomicon: grand wazir, substitution alphabet, data haven, hive mind, dive plan, making license plates, strange information, main vault, math whizzes
It's also curious to see the writers who have no or very few interesting SIPs in their books (try Kurt Vonnegut for instance).
brandonA [email] said at 6:55 PM 04-05-2005: just go to one of the books I mentioned. It's listed right next to the title if the book has been indexed.
It's also later down on the main page of the books.
cecil [email] said at 7:08 PM 04-05-2005: ok, i see. This is potentially interesting if you could enter your own phrase into a search engine. Say I thought I came up with an interesting phrase and then I could look it up to see if it's been used already. Of course, that knowledge could also be crippling.
brandonA [email] said at 7:26 PM 04-05-2005: technically you can. this is part of the 'Search inside' feature, so if you did that for an obscure enough phrase, the books of interest would rise to the top...
brandon [email] said at 11:21 PM 04-05-2005: David Foster Wallace delivered the goods:
entertainment cartridges, annular fusion, say her momma, dawn drills, professional conversationalist, feral hamsters
brandon [email] said at 11:40 PM 04-05-2005: Robert Anton Wilson did ok:
mammalian politics, semantic circuit, domesticated primates, domesticated ape, pack bond, cosmic glue, reality map, conspiracy buffs, emotional game, hidden variable
Robert Bork seems to be writing S&M pornography:
naked power organ, new constitutional rights(freedom from prosecution under sodomy laws), original understanding (Safe words), substantive due process (I hope your orifice can manage my naked power organ), etc.
I think Mark Leyner's works caused problems for the system, cause there's nothing listed for any of them.
brandon [email] said at 2:57 AM 04-30-2005: Coming back to this, I was just on Amazon looking for a book I've been meaning to read. I looked at the SIPs, and, much to my glee realized that they are now links. I don't know if this was the case before. But, now, if you click on an SIP it leads you to a list of all the other books sharing this SIP. Which, well, it's still on the level of a neat little trick. Maybe I just completely missed this before. It wouldn't be the first time.
