In the course of our earlier post on Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” functionality, we naturally encountered SIP’s, or Statistically Improbably Phrases. Amazon bills these as phrases that are quantitatively unlikely to appear in anyone’s book, but which nonetheless crop up more regularly in some works than might be expected. If you’ve located a book and its contents are searchable, Amazon then allows you to look for other books with similar SIP frequencies in them. For instance, the excellent phrase “pagan harponeers” appears a number of times in Moby Dick according to the Amazon page for one edition of that novel. If you click on that phrase, you are hyperlinked to a list of other books that also use those words.

This caused Nick to wonder how this feature would play out when deployed according to the “Six Degrees of Separation” rules.

I therefore had to actually go and find out. Reasoning that half the fun of that game - or its Kevin Bacon variation - is a known starting point and an incongruous end point, I began with the Da Vinci Code. And it turns out that the Dan Brown crypto-religions conspiracy best seller is connected to…wait for it…The The No-Grain Diet: Conquer Carbohydrate Addiction and Stay Slim for the Rest of Your Life.

So, for all those wondering whether or not there was something fishy (pun intended) behind the explosion of anti-carb sentiment, there’s some more food (please, stop me) for thought.

In case you are truly curious as to the chain connecting Brown’s book with the diet work by Joseph Mercola and Alison Levy, here’s the sordid trail:

Da Vinci Code/SIP: corporal mortification - shared with Butler’s Lives of the Saints/SIP: his relics - shared with Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays, 1891-1910/SIP: silent assertion - shared with Lies Across America : What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong/SIP: local boosterism - shared with Best Food Writing 2004/SIP: liver loaf - shared with Boychiks in the Hood: Travels in the Hasidic Underground/SIP: glatt kosher - shared with No-Grain Diet: Conquer Carbohydrate Addiction and Stay Slim for the Rest of Your Life.

I’m particularly amazed by the ground covered over the final four books/SIPs. As we said in our earlier post, we’re not really certain this encourages purchasing. But it’s sure funny.

JF

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 at 4:46 pm and is filed under General, Off-topic Rants.