Over the weekend I was enthralled by thoughts of life, love, the universe, and the glorious summer we are having here on our wonderful hollow earth. I played a board game with co-workers and friends. I took the dogs for walks. What a nice weekend.

Then, all at once, trouble struck. Waiting in line at Target to buy cheap plastic sunglasses was all it took. To my left: a conversation between two foreign policy dilettantes–nothing of value there. To my right: a teenager using the Facebook app on her phone to put a noose around the neck of one of the most endangered species of human emotions in modern life: boredom. How does Python factor in to any of this? We’re almost there.

Boredom doesn’t exist in 2019. It is just about dead. Back in my day I would have to wait in that check out line and squirm. I would have to avoid eye contact by looking at my shoes. I would have to let my thoughts take over and think thoughts from places and about things for reasons of which I cannot possibly know.

Today, that is all over. No one need be bored. Everyone can read or watch or listen to do the same content they would be contenting if they were sitting at home. Standing in line at Target you are exactly the same amount of bored as when you get to choose to do whatever you want because whatever you want is increasingly to consume something digital and mobile and universal.

And when that content is too long or annoying or verbose you have options. You can choose the summaries or highlights. You can choose clips full of predigested detritus restrained by concision and bound by purposeful curation.

As many of you know my goal in life is to become a crotchety old man. The path I usually take is one against the modern world. But we must all pick our battles. I have relented and am now firmly in the camp of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

I am now actively exploring ways to avoid reading. When you start reading something the level of boredom increases as the time spent reading increases. A positive correlation, as it were. Therefore, I have been prototyping tools to help me read less. A download, a few python packages, and a dozen lines of code get me a nice frequency plot of words used in a given website.

Do a pip install ntlk and run nltk.download() in an IPython environment and you’ll get the Natural Language Tool Kit ring-a-ding-ding. This could be something like Jupyter Notebooks. In the code block below, I’ve commented out the download line so I can run the code on different sites.

The first time you run the code, keep this line uncommented and it will bring up a window shown in the next image. Just download all the things to avoid reading too much.

So, we have this cool tool installed (NLTK) to parse words into categorized tokens and such. Using urllib and BeautifulSoup (bs4) we can scrape a website for words (without reading them) and matplotlib + NTLK lets us plot it out.

We build a response object with urllib.request by providing a url, in the example below the wiki page for “Electric power transmission”. We pass that through bs4, clean it up with NLTK, and we have a good list of words that are probably meaningful to us.

We also strip out whatever isn’t an alpha string, so we don’t have to read special characters or numbers. Remember: the goal is as little reading as possible.

The first site we look at is the wiki page for electric power transmission. I glanced at it and boy were there a lot of words. But our plot tells us everything we need to know. Apparently electric power transmission has to do with power, transmission, line, The, and voltage. And just like that I know electric power transmission. Its like downloading Kung Fu from the Matrix.

Electric power distribution is similar. Except the word distribution gives us some special knowledge about this subject.

SSP’s own Joaquin Madrid is smart. Really smart. He is Ph.D. smart. I don’t know if I would ever really understand one of his recent articles “CU Preparedness – Part 1: Getting your GIS CUs Ready for WMS Integration” without help. But our tool here gets us exactly the information we need.

Cutting straight to the important information, I now know that CU and CUs are key to understanding CU preparedness. This has turned out to be a revolutionary tool for the expansion of my personal knowledge base all while avoiding reading-induced boredom. I decided to take this to the next level and master quantum mechanics.

The next time my country needs me to solve a pressing quantum mechanics problem that will save the world I will respond with words like wave, field, state, energy, position, and potential. Who would have thought it is really that simple?

I think there is an ocean of opportunity out there for using these cool python packages to analyze and visualize complex data. Perhaps we can look at a feature class of electric transmission towers, for example. Think of the time we can save and the boredom we can avoid.

So, the next time you are waiting in line at Target, don’t judge the teenager on his or her phone avoiding boredom. Embrace the future. The future of never-ending activity, truncated books, short words, and gloriously devoid of your own frightening thoughts.

Thoughts like the bush outside my window. An American Thrush happens by to eat the berries off the bush. The bush might have 100 bush offspring around the office. All planted by this one American Thrush. Someday those bushes will have their own children bushes and think back to their grandpa bush, and how green he was. But grandpa knows nothing of his bush children, nor will he ever. Yet without grandpa bush, bush children would be nothing but tears in the rain. Wow…time to get back to Python coding…