9.2 Tip of the day

Here are two seemingly unconnected thoughts on co-occurrence patterns and exponential decay (Zipf’s law).

Fact 1: A place where n-grams and co-occurrence patterns were used to make something useful is the computer keyboard. The keyboard layout (QWERTY) was carefully designed to avoid the most frequent letter combinations (bigrams and trigrams) to be on adjacent keys (oversimplified) so that old mechanical typewriters don’t get jammed.

Fact 2: When you work on a project, the amount of time you use on individual aspects also follows a power law like Zipf’s law. Look up the Pareto principle. You probably need 80% of your time to produce 20% of the work and 20% of the time to produce 80% of the work. You cannot avoid that, but you can flatten the curve by focusing on the biggest time sinks, e.g. by following my formatting tips.

Loosely related, my tip of the day is another tiwilbemba: Learn touch typing if you haven’t already. Since you study language, chances are, you will spend most of your work time typing. Learn a good, fast and healthy typing technique and you can save a lot of time in the long run. Just imagine how much faster you’ll write your Bacholor Thesis if you type at twice the speed mistyping half as often, which is easy to achieve for most people. I wish I had learned that many years ago. Believe it or not, it can actually be fun. If you have learned a musical instrument—this is basically what it is like, just much faster to master. If you haven’t learned a musical instrument—forget about touch typing and learn an instrument. :D