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by vowelless 4408 days ago
The title should be " ... of every inmate executed in Texas since 1982."

From reddit [1], here is a word cloud:

http://imgur.com/t61UIgH

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/26rui7/oc_a...

2 comments

Interesting comment on that word cloud:

"Wonder what their victims word cloud would look like? "Mercy" "Please" "I'm begging" "I want my Mommy!" "Help""

Here's from the first hundred or so: http://i.imgur.com/QBo5WWY.png
I plugged it into Wordle at http://www.wordle.net

It's quite poignant.

I deleted it afterwards as it didn't seem right to leave it up in public without more thought.

You have an additional speech mark at the end of that sentence.

> "Help""

He nested quotes. The entire line was wrapper in quotation marks, as well as the individual quotes inside the line. </ocd>
My brain is throwing all sorts of parse errors at that quote full of quotes. This is why we have escape characters! (Or, more realistically, two forms of quotation marks for nesting).
Or separate symbols for the beginning and end of a quote, so nesting is unambiguous. You know, something like:

(quote Wonder what their victims word cloud would look like? (quote Mercy) (quote Please) (quote I'm begging) (quote I want my Mommy!) (quote Help))

Everyone just needs to learn s-expressions.

A professor collaborator of mine has the habit of saying "that does not parse", or "that does not type-check" to nonsensical sentences uttered by clueless research students (full disclosure, that set includes me). At first I found it somewhat weird, but now I've grown to respect it. It totally makes sense.

I remember in high school (when I was already a proficient programmer, but still within-grade in the other sciecnes), struggling with some hard physics problems, and running to my dad for help: he would always say: "dimensional analysis". If only I had connected the dots: doing "dimensional analysis" in your work is _exactly_ the same as type-checking your manually executed paper algorithm. This lightbulb went off in my head approximately a decade too late...

# of executions in Texas since 1982 is probably a fair percentage of the total number of executions since that time. Don't have time to look it up, sorry!
I'd wager that it's not even close, unless you're referring to American executions only. China alone has executed in excess of 2000 people each year int the last few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_capital_punishment_by_c...