A Personal Exploration of Digital History

Remember those fancy little Google Ngrams we were working on a few weeks ago? Here is a very interesting application I found right on the front page of my favorite webcomic, XKCD. I found it very interesting that September 11th far eclipses almost every major holiday in occurrences. Digging a little deeper into the rarely used logical side of my mind, I realized that this can be explained by some of the limitations of using Google’s Ngram viewer that we have been discussing. How often is a holiday going to be referenced in books since 2000 in the English language? Certainly not as often as one of the most major events of the 21st century that happened right after the beginning date for this search. In comparison, holidays are old news. Perhaps I can incorporate this sort of date analysis for whichever event I choose for my final project, which very well may be some aspect of the September 11th terrorist attacks given that I can narrow down the topic enough.

Feeling bored? Like mazes? Check out this neat little demonstration. While you may not pickup on it immediately, the purpose of getting “pegman,” who I have deemed Phillip (because, hey, why not?), through the maze is to work on your programing logic. Challenges include avoiding infinite loops and keeping it concise – something I certainly did not achieve in my attempt depicted below. While I wanted to come up with a method that would work even if I had randomized the maze to redirect the paths, I ended up with a long, highly specific set of directions. Turns out this is a lot more difficult than I thought!