nugacious – Matthew Petroff https://mpetroff.net mpetroff.net Tue, 21 Jun 2016 00:14:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Updating Nugacious https://mpetroff.net/2016/05/updating-nugacious/ https://mpetroff.net/2016/05/updating-nugacious/#respond Mon, 30 May 2016 17:40:03 +0000 https://mpetroff.net/?p=2167 Continue reading →]]> A bit over a year and a half ago, I wrote Nugacious, which provides random quantity comparisons. However, I’ve found a lot of the comparisons to be a bit too random, being things I had never heard of. I finally got around to mitigating this issue, by weighting potential comparisons by popularity. The quantity data Nugacious uses is from DBpedia, which is extracted from Wikipedia. Since each data point is linked to a Wikipedia page and Wikipedia keeps page view statistics, a popularity can be inferred for each data point. I integrated this data by downloading three months of Wikipedia page view statistics,1 extracting the view counts, and associating a view count with each data point. Nugacious’ matching code was then modified to use a weighted average based on these counts for close matches and random matches; one non-weighted random match is still returned for each. Nugacious’ code is available on GitHub.

  1. This was ~190 GB.  ↩

]]> https://mpetroff.net/2016/05/updating-nugacious/feed/ 0 Nugacious https://mpetroff.net/2014/09/nugacious/ https://mpetroff.net/2014/09/nugacious/#respond Tue, 09 Sep 2014 22:30:38 +0000 http://mpetroff.net/?p=1572 Continue reading →]]> Finding random comparisons interesting and being disappointed with the limited and deterministic nature of Wolfram Alpha’s quantity comparisons, I created Nugacious to make random comparisons between physical quantities. Using a set of about 700,000 physical quantities extracted from DBpedia, an ontology created from Wikipedia infoboxes, an essentially limitless number of random comparisons are provided with links to their source Wikipedia pages for your reading pleasure. Try it today!

Nugacious

Edit 2015-06: URLs changed from nugacio.us to nugacious.mpetroff.net as I plan on letting the domain registration expire

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