I created a new law during lunch today. Well, that's not totally true; I didn't first think of it today, I thought it it a long time ago when I read Ivan Stang's book High Weirdness by Mail. But today was when I first applied some head grease to the idea and "codified" it (so to speak). Like I mentioned elsewhere, I'm not sure if anyone has come up with this before I did (these physics guys notwithstanding), so I'll put a flag in it right now and call it Wee's Law of Tinfoil Hats. It's very simple. My law states:
"The chances that a written work was authored by a crackpot increase with the percentage of completely capitalized words in the work."
Not a novel idea, I know, but then neither was the notion that things fell downward. Until they had a law about it, that information wasn't as useful as it could be. Not being one to bitch about something for which I cannot offer a solution, I decided to make a law so that this information could be applied to things such that answers can be seen and solutions derived.
Anyway, it was pointed out to me today by a nice fellow named Joel Parker that my law works just as nicely for software as it does for manifestoes (I originally got started on the idea today when I saw mention of the Unabomber's manifesto). Figuring that a concrete application of an idea can lead to definitive conclusions, I set out to see if this was true. I think I've succeeded in rigorously demonstrating that my theories are law.
I propose that I can produce, without too much effort, Wee's Tinfoil Hat Law (TFH) ratios for the GPL, the FreeBSD license, and a Microsoft license which will substantiate my law as it applies to software, and therefore any other written work. Here is my method:
Once we have all of our licenses, we can use this tiny Perl script to calcuate the TFH ratio for each one. Here's the script we need:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my ($count, $total, $file, $word);
unless ($file = $ARGV[0]) {
print "Which file would you like check for TFH Ratio? ";
print "(Enter filename the ctrl+d.)\n";
chomp($file = $_) while(<STDIN>);
}open(FILE, "./$file") || die $!;
while (<FILE>) {
chomp;
foreach my $word (split(/\b/, $_)) {
$total++;
$count++ if ($word =~ /\b[A-Z]+\b/);
}
}
close(FILE);print "Checking '$file':\n";
print " Total number of words.... $total\n";
print " Number of ALL CAP words.. $count\n\n";
printf("TFH Ratio: %.2f\n\n", ($count / $total) * 100);
Save it as 'tfh.pl'. Now we run it on all the files that we saved:
[wee@hostname tfh]$ ./tfh.pl gpl.lic
Checking 'gpl.lic':
Total number of words.... 4993
Number of ALL CAP words.. 217TFH Ratio: 4.35
[wee@hostname tfh]$ ./tfh.pl bsd.lic
Checking 'bsd.lic':
Total number of words.... 450
Number of ALL CAP words.. 114TFH Ratio: 25.33
[wee@hostname tfh]$ ./tfh.pl win98_up.lic
Checking 'win98_up.lic':
Total number of words.... 1875
Number of ALL CAP words.. 585TFH Ratio: 31.20
So it would seem, based on this admittedly simplistic test, that Mr. Parker was completely justified in wanting to apply my law to software. Without getting overly empirical, I believe I have shown that GPL'ed software is about one eighth as crackpot-ish as "typical" MS software, and around one-fifth as wacky as BSD licensed software. I further belive that by extension, and with applying popular opinion and common knowledge, my law adequately describes those individuals who author non-sensical or purposefully obfuscated documents in order to pass them off as rational thought. I welcome any comments.
I DON'T UNDERSTAND ALL OF WHAT YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT, BUT I FELT COMPELLED TO WRITE...
Posted by suzi at February 12, 2003 8:58 PM