NSS-Analysis
The Friday Bun Society is proud to present The Way for evaluating the amount of information in a sentence. The Way is called NSS-Analysis, where NSS stands for “No Shit, Sherlock”.
NSS-Analysis is calculated as the ratio of “words enough to give the information” per “words used to give the information”. This means that the optimal result of NSS-Analysis is 1 (there are no useless words in given sentence). Articles are omitted.
An example: assume that “The invidivual member of the social community often received his information via visual, symbolic channels” could be compressed down to “People read”. The result of NSS-Analysis (i.e. NSS-Ratio) would thus be 2 / 12 = 0,17.
If the given sentence has no information content whatsoever, the ratio is 0.
Beware of slides, articles, newspapers or conversations where the typical NSS-Ratio is much closer to zero than one.
November 29th, 2005 at 09:43
Another useful analysis method is the BSB-Analysis (BullShit-Bingo Analysis), calculated as the ratio of BS-words per total number of words in a sentence. Here, of course, 0 is the optimal result, whereas 1 is close to lethal.
Somehow, for a reason still unknown, the marketing material often seems to contain phrases where the BSB-Ratio is much closer to one than zero.
November 29th, 2005 at 13:28
What is this The Marketing Material you are referring to?
BTW, these two ratios seem quite confusing or even contradictory to me. Both NSS and BSB clearly measure the same thing, but NSS dictates that there is no shit whereas BSB strongly implies that there is shit, after all. Which indicator should we trust?
November 29th, 2005 at 14:15
Ooops – I was not reffering to any specific Marketing Material, no way, never, by no means. I was really thinking about some generic stuff. Really. The usual marketing material. :]
But they do measure slightly different aspects: BSB gives you the ratio of boasting, whereas NSS can be low even without BS-words.
November 29th, 2005 at 16:52
Ok, even if NSS and BSB have minor differences we can still end up in a conflicting situation where we have shit but then again not. What a nasty deadlock.
Consider the following, totally imaginary sentence:
Friday Bun Society maintains a superior bun consumption process combined with a deep understanding of bun variants and bun-eating venues, and the ability to enjoy new delicacies and other bun-like substances that serve our lust for good buns.
Even without a thorough BSB analysis you can see that the above statement is overloaded with bovine feces. I’d say that the BSB ratio is somewhere between 0,9 and 1,0. A strong indicator of shit existence.
What about the NSS ratio then? I guess that statement could be compressed down to:
Friday Bun Society likes and knows buns.
This yields the NSS ratio: 6 / 28 = 0,2142857143. (Please forgive me for possible miscalculations, I didn’t have the patience to re-check the figures.) Anyway, this suggests that there’s no shit for Sherlock here.
I think we need to improve these metrics a bit further so that the ratios would clearly indicate that, yes, there is shit but no shit that Sherlock should be concerned about.
November 29th, 2005 at 21:16
Now I get your point. I failed to see the special case of shit dedication. My apologies to Sherlocks. I suggest that the Society forms a committee to decide how to take this into account.