T w e n t y S i d e d

Random surfing took me here, which led me to Gender Genie, which is a program that examines written text and attempts to ascertain the gender of the writer. Amazingly, the analysis is done on seemingly innocuous words like “if”, “with” and “where” and not by looking for obvious male / female subject matter like cars vs. cats. (Or whatever stereotypes seem likely.) Also interesting is the size of their word lists. Gender Genie uses just sixteen “female” words and 17 “male” ones when determining the supposed gender of the author.

The program claims 80% accuracy. That’s pretty interesting to me, although Gender Genie thinks I’m a woman. I tried out several long posts (their directions suggest that text should be at least 500 words in length) and Gender Genie regularly called me a woman. When I use shorter posts, my score tips female by an even wider margin. I tried text from a few people in my blogroll, and it correctly and unambiguously identified everyone else.

I wonder what it is about my style that is causing this? It really was amazing to see that my various ruminations on roleplaying games, videogames, and geek culture – all of which seem like nominally male-dominated pursuits to me – were somehow feminine to Gender Genie. I don’t think this is bad. I’m not insulted. I don’t think this means the software sucks. I just find it curious.

The gender politics behind the system will probably chafe some (it made me roll my eyes a couple of times) but laying aside why the designer thinks males and females use various words at the given frequency, the truth remains that males and females really do write differently and this difference can usually be detected via a brute-force word count. I can’t help but get the feeling that the authors might be trying to prove something about males and females with this exercise. Maybe one to many agenda-driven gender studies has left me paranoid and jaded. In any case, the mathematics at the end interest me far more than the reading of tea leaves taking place in the main body.

I’d like to see how it does against other people. I tried a few people from my regular reading list, although I don’t want to offend anyone by outing the gender of their authorial voice. If you want to try it yourself, just grab a longish post of yours, stick it into the thingy, and see what guess it makes about your gender.

And finally: This post, which is 450 words long, scores 525 female and 468 male. Maybe I should grow a mustache and see if that nudges the score in my favor.

LATER: Other reactions to the program here and here.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This site is where you can buy a Klein Bottle, a one-sided three-dimensional container with a volume of zero. (It doesn’t specify if the zero is in liters or gallons, though. A disappointing oversight. I don’t want to end up having to perform metric-to-imperial conversions while calculating how much nothing the thing can’t contain.)

They have to cheat a bit to get the thing into three-dimensional space. The nexus where the handle / neck intersects is displeasing, but it’s a necessary compromise because because most glassblowers refuse to work in four dimensions.

(Yes, I can see this site is ages old, almost prehistoric by internet standards. It’s so old it’s new again. Anyway, I’ve never seen it before.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Hey, what is with all the Coke blogging lately? I don’t watch TV, so I don’t know what is causing this. Is there a new ad campaign on?

Some people take this cola stuff very seriously, and get upset if they can’t get the brand they want. I don’t understand this, because I am one of those people who can’t taste the difference. Maybe I’d be able to tell if I had the two drinks together, but if you put one in front of me I couldn’t tell you which one it was without looking at the container.

I drink Pepsi more often, but it’s only because I don’t have to reach down to get it. I always drink caffene-free, and at the nearby Sheetz the cold caffene-free Pepsi is at eye level and the caffene-free Coke is a few shelves down. I’d have to bend slightly to get the Coke. If they moved the Coke up and the Pepsi down, I’d probably become a Coke drinker. If the two were on the same level I might keep buying Pepsi out of habit, or I might buy whichever brand was closer to my hand once I pulled the door open. I suppose we’d need to set up a controlled experiment to find the truth. (Actually, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that a great deal of money was being spent studying this very problem. Fickle, apathetic customers like me are the worst.)

I will hand them this, Coke has the best ads:

LATER: Alex settles the debate like a true Aussie.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

A few eagle-eyed readers might have noticed the Fear the Boot link and banner that have been appearing on the site for the past couple of days. The show is a podcast about tabletop roleplaying. They recently had me on the show for an interview and we talked about D&D, DM of the Rings, and a bit about me personally. It was great fun. If you want to know a bit about how DM of the Rings works behind the scenes or about my experiences as a DM in the past, then you should definitely give it a listen.

I never really got into podcasts before Fear the Boot, but I must say the show is quite enjoyable. It flows less like a talk show and more like an animated conversation between friends. It works really well.

If you want to dive in and see what the rest of the show is like, then I suggest starting around episode 40 and going forward from there. The archives are huge and it would take forever to hear them all, and I think the most recent episodes are their best work to date.

Thanks again to Dan, Chad and John for having me on.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Last night I noticed you can create a free 10-day trial for World of Warcraft, and download the software directly. Like an idiot I clicked and began the registration process. It wasn’t until I’d gotten halfway done that I realized what a stupid thing I was doing and backed away.

I’ve known for a long time that this game would suck me in if I was ever foolish enough to try it. Right now my time is carefully balanced between work, family, the website, the comic, and videogames. Something like WoW would upset this careful balance and quickly devour the time set aside for these other projects. Unlike single-player games, you can’t pause an MMO. You can’t pick it up and play for thirty minutes at a time and come away with a satifying experience. An MMO is a demanding hobby and I don’t have room for another one of those right now.

Still, if you’ve wanted to see what the fuss is about then it looks like now is a great time to try the game out.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.