In Our Time Archive* Nothing but Cumber* Handsome as Ever*

 

Here's the In Our Time Archive*

In Our Time has been broadcast for 25 years so while there is some consistency to the way the show notes are structured, there is also a lot of variation.

So to extract the data, we use gpt-3.5-turbo by OpenAI which is the large language model that powers ChatGPT. The HTML is minimally simplified then GPT is prompted to extract:

• the episode description
• guests and their affiliations
• and the reading list.

GPT is asked to respond with valid JSON (a machine-readable data format) which it mostly does, although this often needs fixing. (This technique was sufficiently novel when the site launched that the announcement post at Hacker News has 688 points.)

Episode transcripts are not used for the main site.

GPT is also used to:

• give each episode a Dewey-Decimal classification (a library code) – the guess turns out to be pretty good
• calculate similar episodes by converting each show description to an embedding vector, and finding the nearest neighbours using cosine distance.

Nothing but cumber*

I'm listening to The Mill on the Floss.  Came across this line:  “Did Mr Tulliver let you have the money all at once?” said Mrs Tulliver, still lost in the conception of things which had been “going on” without her knowledge.

“No; at twice,” said Mrs Moss, rubbing her eyes and making an effort to restrain her tears. “The last was after my bad illness four years ago, as everything went wrong, and there was a new note made then. What with illness and bad luck, I’ve been nothing but cumber all my life.”

I've never heard it as a noun before.  

Vocab.com says, about the verb:  To cumber is to make something more difficult or burdensome. Don't cumber yourself by trying to carry all those tote bags through the airport — get a rolling suitcase instead!

The old-fashioned verb cumber is rarely used these days, but you still see hints of it in words like cumbersome and unencumbered. It derives from the Old French combre, "obstruction," and its root, meaning "to carry." If you come across this word in an old poem or novel, you'll know it means "to burden." In Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, for example, the character of Meg is described as "cumbered with many cares."

American Heritage Dictionary says about the noun: 

n.

A hindrance; an encumbrance.

[Middle English combren, to annoy, from Old French combrer, from combre, hindrance, from Vulgar Latin *comboros, of Celtic origin.]

Handsome as Ever*

Thoreau’s November Kalendar chart included “frost on window”. In 1853 box he writes 25 in 1855 it’s Dec 14 heavy. In 57 it’s 27 beautiful. In 60 it’s 25 handsome as ever. In 61 it’s Dec 14 handsome.