Frequency Analysis of XKCD's 'What If?'
I thought it’d be fun to do a word frequency analysis of XKCD author Randall Munroe’s wonderful “What If?” series.
After tokenizing all current 102 “What If?” entries and removing common stop words, the following words were some of the most common:
speed - 181 occurrences
surface - 143 occurrences
energy - 125 occurrences
meters - 119 occurrences
second - 119 occurrences
space - 91 occurrences
pressure - 81 occurrences
still - 81 occurrences
million - 80 occurrences
moon - 80 occurrences
average - 80 occurrences
Okay, that’s fun, but not super surprising. To dig deeper, I switched to counting the number of different entries that a given word shows up in, instead of just the total occurrence count.
It starts with some equivocation
probably - 73 entries
around - 69 entries
might - 63 entries
then moves on to physics and time
earth - 56 entries
world - 51
hard - 50
years - 50
speed - 46
surface - 45
meters - 44
air - 43
speed - 43
water - 42
ground - 35
problem - 35
energy - 34
atmosphere - 33
matter - 33
space - 33
billion - 32
force - 30
gravity - 22
sea - 21
then to unfortunate outcomes
impact - 21 entries
unfortunately - 18
surprisingly - 18
roughly - 17
die - 17
destroy - 16
population - 16
rapidly - 16
weird - 16
experience - 16
Then I decided to see how this compares to what we know and love about XKCD.
Well, ‘dinosaur(s)’ only show up in 9 entries. Of those, the favorites are tyrannosaurus, sauropods, and spinosaurus, but each of those only shows up in one entry. Very surprisingly, raptors never show up except in illustrations!
Other popular topics include spacecraft (14 entries), baseball (9 entries), asteroids and meteors (both 9 entries, but not always the same ones), explosions and vaporization (7 entries), nuclear (13) & radiation (7), and hurricanes (8). Here are some more common topics:
orbit - 19 entries
mountain - 19
moon - 16
island - 14
rocket - 14
spacecraft - 14
oxygen - 12
satellite - 11
atmospheric - 11
launch - 11
lifetime - 10
war - 10
weapon - 9
mach - 9
government - 9
blast - 9
bullet - 8
airplane - 8
hurricane - 8
hydrogen - 8
molecule - 7
trigger - 6
extinction - 6
I think I’m seeing a trend. Now back to reading What If?!