JF Ptak Science Books

A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

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Category: WORD art

  • Wordle Word Art: 200 Einstein Quotations

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 251

    My thanks to Jeff De Cagna for the suggestion of Wordle-ing a favorite Einstein quotation–its a fine idea.  What I’ve done is take 200 or so quotes and made one large file of them and fed it into the Wordle-izer with the following results (below)  Again Wordle weights words in size according to the number of times it appears in a document, so the resulting image is a wort of word map, a lay of the land if you will of this collection of quotes, showing the words most often used by Einstein (at least in the quotes that I have selected).  The longish quote list is below in the continue reading section(unfortunately without source attribution). 
    Clicking on the image will enlarge it and make it clearer.

    It is interesting to note that the largest word here seems to be “can”, followed closely by “one”, which I think is really another way of his saying “you” or “us” or “we”–so, we get “you can” or “we can” or “one can”, speaking to the possibility of possibility, of effort, of moving forward, of trying.  Imagination, effort, thought, creation–that’s what the man was all about, and I think that’s what we see in this word map. 

    Wordleeinstein_190

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  • Wordle Word Art: Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres)

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC

    Wordlecopernicus
    Here again is another Wordle treatment—this time we’ve fed it
    the first 10 chapters of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On
    the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres    ). As usual Wordle offers a very interesting
    insight into word usage even though I was forced to limit the text selection to
    Book I and stop at the point where diagrams are used to illustrate the
    text. Be that as it may, even in this
    limited application, Wordle does surface some interesting bits from the
    relatively “popular” part of this revolutionary treatise.

    (Click on the image to enlarge and make clearer.)

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  • Wordle Word Art–Vocabulary from Einstein’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC

    Einstein_1923_nobel
    Einstein’s delayed 1923 acceptance speech for his hideously delayed
    Nobel prize–finally offered to him in 1921 for his “work on the
    photoelectric effect” of 1905–is generated here into a piece of Found
    Word Art, fashioned by the language-generator residing in the WORDLE site.
    As in the other cases of word art generated by Wordle, the work is the
    product of the vocabulary-digester at Wordle, which in this case
    consumed the entire text of the speech and displayed it according to
    the appearance of the most popularly-used words.  The results of these
    jaunts into Wordle have been fascinating to me, as I hope they are to
    you. 

    The full text of the Einstein speech (which is tricky to find in full
    text versions) is below.  I’m sorry to say that I’ve messed up the
    equations, trying to fit them into typepad. 

    Also you can click on the Wordle display to make it not only larger but clearer. 

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  • Wordle Word Art–Vocabulary from Einstein’s Complete List of Publications

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 248

    This piece of Found Word Art is generated by the word-synthesizer at the lovely Wordle site which crunched and counted the occurrence of words in the titles and attributions of Albert Einstein’s complete opus. (See our page on the Einstein publications which we used to generate this art here.)

    If you click on the image it will become larger and clearer. 
    Wordle_einstein_annalen

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  • Wordle Word Art–Vocabulary from Einstein’s Two Letters to Roosevelt on the Atomic Bomb

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC

    The newest contribution to my new-found category of Found Word Art is constructed from the text of Albert Einstein’s two letters (August 2 1939 and March 7 1940) to President Franklin Roosevelt about the use of the coming atomic weapon.  The text of the letters was simply deposited in the wonder-engine word-atomizer at WORDLE, and the relative distribution of the most commonly-used words were given new representation in relative sizes.  I should point out the earliest post I did on the cautionary letters of Einstein and Szilard to FDR and refer to it for the explanation the occurrences of some of the Wordle words.

    If you click on the image it will become larger and clearer.

    The complete text of the two letters is found below in the Continue Reading section.

    Wordleeinstein

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