Alison O’Brien, writing for Pretty Famous:

PrettyFamous, an entertainment research site by Graphiq, found the most famous band formed each year since 1951. To do this, they created a customized Band Score on a scale of 1 to 100 based on a weighted average of a band’s Wikipedia page views in the last 30 days, page views of album releases and total number of Spotify followers.

Some fun ones: Brand New (2000), Fall Out Boy (2001), ABBA (1972), and Pink Floyd (1965).

Peter Sterne, writing for Politico, on how Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, has filed for bankruptcy:

“Gawker Media Group’s resilient brands and people will thrive under new ownership, when the sale closes in the next few weeks,” he wrote. “On this bitter day for me, I am consoled by the fact that my colleagues will soon be freed from this tech billionaire’s vendetta.”

Hogan sued Denton, Gawker and Daulerio in 2012, after the news site published a short excerpt of one of Hogan’s sex tapes. Peter Thiel, a billionaire technology venture capitalist who dislikes Gawker, secretly funded Hogan’s lawsuit against the company.

The NPD is reporting that bluetooth headphone revenue has overtaken non-bluetooth headphone revenue for the first time:

According to The NPD Group’s Retail Tracking Service, Bluetooth headphone revenue overtook non-Bluetooth for the first time in June accounting for 54 percent of headphone dollar sales and 17 percent of unit sales in the U.S.

The joy of not having a cord attached to my pocket is amazing. But Bluetooth still sucks, a lot. Trying to use multiple devices, not looking ridiculous with that behind-the-head cord, and the sound quality is still not there. Oh, and every time my phone doesn’t want to connect to the headphones I’m sure it’s punishing me for all the times I set it next to the charger instead of actually plugging it in because, what?, it’s not the boss of me.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester, writing at FiveThirtyEight, on all the rancid olive oil we probably use:

“We call the U.S. the world’s dumping ground for rancid and defective olive oil. We don’t know the difference,” said Sue Langstaff, a sensory scientist who consults for the beer, wine and olive oil industries, among others. Studies have shown that even frequent olive oil consumers in the U.S. don’t know what the extra virgin or cold pressed designations mean, let alone have the ability to taste the difference. And in blind taste tests, consumers often prefer lower-quality olive oils.

A data scientist decided to look through 22,000 metal albums to find out what words are the most “metal.” Turns out “burn” is the most metal word. And then “cries,” “veins,” “eternity,” and “breathe.”

In the face of this complexity, it is not surprising that understanding natural language, in the same way humans do, with computers is still a unsolved problem. That said, there are an increasing number of techniques that have been developed to provide some insight into natural language. They tend to start by making simplifying assumptions about the data, and then using these assumptions convert the raw text into a more quantitative structure, like vectors or graphs. Once in this form, statistical or machine learning approaches can be leveraged to solve a whole range of problems.

I haven’t had much experience playing with natural language, so I decided to try out a few techniques on a dataset I scrapped from the internet: a set of heavy metal lyrics (and associated genres).