From: Sent: To: Cc: Subject: Noam Chomsky Sunday, June 21, 2015 2:42 AM RE: Re: Valeria's not here right now, so will have to check with her about late September. Really intriguing possibilities, and a delightful offer. On Yang, I read his work quite differently. He does make use of word frequencies and probability distributions, but as far as I am aware in pretty straightforward and innocuous ways. And he's quite sophisticated about these matters. Smart and interesting guy. You might want to contact him directly. I don't recall his using Zipf's "laws," but it wouldn't matter much. Mandelbrot showed back in the '50s that they were a statistical artifact, near meaningless. I was, incidentally, surprised to see how he dealt with this result in his autobiography. I think he called it his "Keplerian moment," or something like that. Noam From: Jeffrey E. [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2015 12:10 PM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: Re: I think you might try to plan on late september, , taking my apt and spending a few days with valeria in the city, As it is the openiing of the UN general assembly , as well as the Clinton global initiative New york is rife with people with at least influence, if not new ideas. . I, we. can organize many fun interactions. my house becomes a respite for the select few, to take off their ties , and talk openly. You would be welcome to join as many create or participate as you prefer. yangs work deals with language as signals . his reliance on Zipf like distributions is a good example of naive probablities.. empirically zipf appears. but cannot be derived from any of his or anyones elses to date. so somewhat misleading to suggest the" probililty of word , x appearing, " it is the mistake of frequency vs probablity, and careless common usage. On Sat, Jun 20, 2015 at 11:44 AM, Noam Chomsky > wrote: EFTA_R1_01334602 EFTA02353763