SIPs (Statistically Improbable Phrases), are cool. Why? Because Wired and Benjamin Vershbow think they’re cool. Why else? Because SIPs are echoes of Foucault’s Pendulum.
To quote a review of the plot by the San Francisco Chronicle,
“Three clever book editors, inspired by an extraordinary fable they heard years before, decide to have a little fun. Randomly feeding esoteric bits of knowledge into an incredible computer capable of inventing connections between all their entries, they think they are creating a long lazy game–until the game starts taking over….”
I remember being obsessed with developing the right parsing algorithm, the right regular expressions (regex) that would allow me to farm the answer to “life, the universe, and everything“ from the collected works of Project Gutenberg (I read the novel and had the obsession in the early 90s).
Well, let’s see what SIPs we get when we look up Foucault’s Pendulum (How postmodern of me, eh? Very meta)
Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
lapis exillis, spiritual knighthood, annos patebo, telluric currents, sacrifice humain, hay wain, subterranean currents, bearded gentleman…
See any arcane and revealing patterns?
Don’t forget, in principio erat Verbum.
