Notes - free will / no comment / Stats for Chapters 13, 14, 15 / readability tests

         Mid-morning. You are about to do your exercises which you have been doing consistently except for Friday and Saturday last. Thursday you had forty minutes and yesterday thirty-five, mostly though you stick to thirty-minute sessions. You have stats to put together today so you are ready to move on to the next three chapters. – Amorella

         0955 hours. I am beginning to see the end of the tunnel as far as book ‘four’ is concerned (book one of GMG). Eventually I will have to decide how to set up the publishing. Yesterday’s post suggests that I do not have free will. This is not correct. 

         Then change yesterday’s post while posting this. - Amorella

          1007 hours. I reviewed yesterday's post. I erred. In context what you say is true, you give me no choice (in here) but to be honest. This is not the same as having free will. I have the free will to shut the blog down if I wish but I do not wish to do so. The blog allows me to 'vent' my thoughts and in doing so I become freer in my ability to write from the unconscious via you, Amorella.

            Post. - Amorella

         1154 hours. I have the statistics completed but I forgot to set a theme word for each of the chapters.

         You were going to write “Unbelievable” next but you know it is not true. – Amorella

         It is almost noon. I am going to take a break.

         No one is stopping you, boy. – Amorella

         After noon. Carol is readying for errands and lunch at Panera (her favorite veggie soup is on three days a week and this is one of them). You are looking for help for your themes because these small but important aspects are somewhat foreign to you and besides you don’t know where to begin in your search. One chapter at a time appears the easiest method, boy. – Amorella

         1226 hours. Thanks for the help, Amorella. Later though, Carol is about to come down the stairs.

         The sarcasm is noted. – Amorella

         That’s how I feel; I’m not going to be sorry for it. I’m upset with me for not noticing all along.

         The theme word helps the reader. – Amorella

         No comment.

         Post. - Amorella

         1246 hours. Carol is checking the mail and in the meantime I came up with the theme words. Chapter theme word in bold.

         Good. Add and post the statistics. – Amorella

** **

Ch. 13 - Spice

Words. 3187         Words per Sentence 13.6

Sentences 230

Sentences/Paragraph 2.4

Passive Sentences 2.0 percent

Flesh Reading Ease 100

Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level 1.3

Ch. 14 - Continuity

Words. 3135          Words per Sentence 11.2          

Sentences 271

Sentences/Paragraph 2.3

Passive Sentences 3.0 percent

Flesh Reading Ease 100

Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level 0.5

Ch. 15 - Relations

Words. 3015         Words per Sentence 13.1

Sentences 224

Sentences/Paragraph 2.1

Passive Sentences 0 percent

Flesh Reading Ease 100

Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level 1.2

** **

         You had your Panera/Chipotle lunches and presently you are waiting for Carol who is picking up a last minute Valentine card for Kim and Paul. You hope to surprise Kim by including a copy of a Valentine poem you wrote for her when she was six years old. Below you were shocked to see how the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease formula is scored. – Amorella

** **

According to Wikipedia's entry on Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease, the reading ease is scored on a 0-100 scale and ". . . higher scores indicate material that is easier to read; lower numbers mark passages that are more difficult to read." The score is calculated using a formula you can find on Wikipedia (if you're interested). More helpful than the formula is this information about how to interpret scores:

90.0–100.0 -- easily understandable by an average 11-year-old student

60.0–70.0 -- easily understandable by 13- to 15-year-old students

0.0–30.0 -- best understood by university graduates

From Yahoo Best Answers which relates back to Wikipedia

** **

         1411 hours. I cannot believe in all these years that I never had the curiosity to look up the scoring. Somehow I got it into my mind early on that a 1 equaled a high school graduate. I always felt (in all my books) that I was writing for mostly a high school junior or senior College Prep, Honors or AP student since those are the people I taught for so many years. On the college side I added at least a college sophomore level as a general four-year mix – ages 16 through 20 year olds. Here I come to find out the 1 stands for best understood by university students (and graduates I assume).

         You have greater reading expectations. – Amorella

         The F-K score goes up to 30. I mean, give me a break.

         Add the formulas here to remind you of how it works.

** **

Flesch–Kincaid readability test

The Flesch/Flesch–Kincaid readability tests are designed to indicate test comprehension difficulty when reading a passage of contemporary academic English. There are two tests, the Flesch Reading Ease, and the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level. Although they use the same core measures (word length and sentence length), they have different weighting factors, so the results of the two tests correlate approximately inversely: a text with a comparatively high score on the Reading Ease test should have a lower score on the Grade Level test. Both systems were devised by Rudolf Flesch.

History

"The Flesch–Kincaid" (F–K) Reading grade level was developed under contract to the United States Navy in 1975 by J. Peter Kincaid and his team. Other related US Navy research directed by Kincaid delved into high tech education (for example, the electronic authoring and delivery of technical information); usefulness of the Flesch–Kincaid readability formula; computer aids for editing tests; illustrated formats to teach procedures; and the Computer Readability Editing System (CRES).

The F-K formula was first used by the US Army for assessing the difficulty of technical manuals in 1978 and soon after became the Department of Defense military standard. The commonwealth of Pennsylvania was the first state in the US to require that automobile insurance policies be written at no higher than a ninth grade level of reading difficulty, as measured by the F-K formula. This is now a common requirement in many other states and for other legal documents such as insurance policies.

Flesch Reading Ease

In the Flesch Reading Ease test, higher scores indicate material that is easier to read; lower numbers mark passages that are more difficult to read. The formula for the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES) test is

206.835 – 1.015 (total words___) – 84.6 (total syllables)

                              (total sentences)                 (total words)

Scores can be interpreted as shown in the table below.

Reader’s Digest magazine has a readability index of about 65, Time magazine scores about 52, an average 6th grade student's (an 11-year-old) written assignment has a readability test of 60–70 (and a reading grade level of 6–7), and the Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30s. The highest (easiest) readability score possible is around 120 (e.g. every sentence consisting of only two one-syllable words). The score does not have a theoretical lower bound. It is possible to make the score as low as you want by including words with arbitrarily many syllables. This sentence, for example, taken as a reading passage unto itself, has a readability score of about 18.5. This paragraph has a readability score of 19.1. The sentence, "The Australian platypus is seemingly a hybrid of a mammal and reptilian creature" is a 24.4. This article has a readability score of around 42.0. One particularly long sentence about sharks in chapter 64 of Moby-Dick has a readability score of -146.77.

Many government agencies require documents or forms to meet specific readability levels.

The U.S. Department of Defense uses the Reading Ease test as the standard test of readability for its documents and forms. Florida requires that life insurance policies have a Flesch Reading Ease score of 45 or greater.

Use of this scale is so ubiquitous that it is bundled with popular word processing programs and services such as KWord, IBM Lotus Symphony, Microsoft Office Word, WordPerfect and WordPro.

Long words affect this score significantly more than they do the grade level score.

From Wikipedia

** **

         2118 hours. Leftovers for supper, and we watched “The Best of Jimmy Fallon”, “Downton Abbey” and NBC News. I have spent some time researching these readability tests and software. I think I have enough with MS Office. The key is readability ease, which is always 100 percent in the chapters.

         Good of you to come to that conclusion once again. These are not children’s books, boy. Tomorrow we work on Dead 16 and move right along through that chapter and the next two. I have been ‘listening’ to your mind about publication prospects. Direct yourself to discover more about the iBook process and keep an open mind for now. – Amorella

         I have been leaning Amazon because the market appears open to more people. Mostly I am thinking about who have access with more electronic ‘readers’. I have saved the money to self publish as I have done through iUniverse, Inc. I have put Diplomat in the backseat for the time being. I am working on ideas though.

         You don’t need to explain to me. I know exactly what you are thinking and the reasoning behind it. Tomorrow, dude. Post. - Amorella

Notes - recent NASA Mars photos / Amorella keeps me honest

         Mid-afternoon. You were looking over your photos from NASA and have two recent ones that are beyond words to you – that is, as you view them up close and personal because you never dreamed you would be able to see such a view. Drop them in, the Martian sunset first, then the photo from Mars to Earth in the Martian evening sky, i.e. Earth as we see Venus in the evening sky. - Amorella

Martian Sunset

  

From Mars to Earth as an Evening ‘Star’

         1538 hours. I did remove the arrow and “Earth” and on my desktop the ‘bluish’ planet can be readily seen. I am going to keep it on my desktop for a while.

         Post. - Amorella

         You and Carol took a short drive to McD’s on Mason-Montgomery Road and while there you remembered you wrote a poem about a Martian sunrise or sunset or seeing Earth in the evening or morning sky sometime in the seventies. It was published but you don’t remember where; and its title is: “Mars One”. You spent an hour at your basement desk looking through your files but did not find it. You found another titled “Moon City One” but it was about a man going earth (light) mad. – Amorella

         1807 hours. You are right; it has been an hour. I cannot find the poem but that is probably the reason for my ‘intensity of feeling’ in terms of the photographs shot from Mars. I rummaged through lots of writings and sketches. “Moon City” is a longer poem. “Mars One” was less than sixteen lines. I found a couple old poems that I thought about sharing and I found a hundred pages of an unfinished novel about the Druids that I had written in the eighties. Some of those pages I could drop right into “The Dead” selections with only minor revision.

         Evening. You had leftover soup and watched last week’s “Elementary” and “Intelligence” as well as NBC News. Since you have been in the basement looking for the Mars poem and after another hour you found it in a folder in your father-in-law’s old metal file cabinet. Here is the poem.

** **

FROM MARS:  1

By R. H. Orndorff  ©1979

            Crystalline pink reflections jab into a dark hued skylight.

            Laser-like they ray on the starkly singular human form

            Who is looking out toward his first Martian sunrise –

                        There is night, but there is no fog and mist.

                        There are no Grendel-like monsters here.

            His lips motion a secret and unofficial pronouncement,

                        “There will be no myths on the fourth world.”

His mind counters with a far distant thought.

                        One may be raised up

                        So that he might fall further down.

            To be alone, and the first, is truly a different existence –

            To comprehend the beginning of a full Martian sunrise

            One has to first witness his earthly world fading as a double world,

                        The low in-the-sky twin beauties;

                        One is dressed starkly naked white

                        And is touching her scantly clad blue-robed sister,

                        And each smiles suggestively down, towards him alone.

            “Until darkness falls,” are his only other words

            As he notes the forceful sun rising over a low rock-strewn dune.

           

            [Published – I think it was “The Blue Moon Gazette” a poetry booklet published in Albany, New York in 1979]

** **

         2211 hours. Obviously the photo does not show the Moon as I had envisioned, but when I write I am in the setting, in my mind I was there, and here in real life I can see a real example of the “scantly clad blue-robed sister”. It turns out I did have the words after all, at least some of them 35 years ago.

         You are still in surprise and privately wonder on the serendipity and happenstance of this moment that has lie in wait for these thirty-five years to occur. – Amorella

         It is as a gift.

         From whom? – Amorella

         Why do you do this? Why do you complicate the matter? I said it is as a gift, not a gift.

         I am reminding you of your grammar. A gift by definition must have a giver. So, who or what is implied as the giver? – Amorella

         I misspoke. It was an unintended remark. To answer your question though – it is a gift that I had lived long enough to write the poem and it is a gift that I lived long enough to see pretty much the real event in a NASA photograph. The gift is my longevity for which I am indeed thankful. I have had a most fortunate life. I have stated this before.

         So, you thank your lucky stars? – Amorella

         2229 hours. If I must respond to you as though I were dead and you are an Angel questioning me, then I say, “No, although I am an agnostic still (how do I know you are not an illusion and I am questioning myself). I thank G---D, if G---D so exists with what I have left, heartansoulanmind.”

         Now you can post knowing that this is you speaking the truth as far as you can know at present. – Amorella

         2234 hours. Wouldn’t it be easier for you to just say, “Do you swear on the Bible or on your mother’s grave?”

         One of your Bibles, the one you were given when you joined the Presbyterian Church, is in the basement with your books. A third of your mother’s cremains are in a can in the southeast corner of your bedroom behind your black chair. You would say it was blasphemous to swear on either, would you not? – Amorella

         The thought had not occurred to me but you are right I would rebel in arrogance. (What a humbling thought.)

         Now, post. Good night my young man. - Amorella

        2245 hours. I am grateful you keep me honest.

         In here I give you no choice, boy. - Amorella

         

Notes - (final) Pouch 15 / trip and family /

         Evening. You just completed reading over Pouch 15 and really didn’t make any changes. – Amorella

         2052 hours. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t catch any errors. I can go over it again.

         Why?

         I assume there are errors either in content or grammar. I say this while at the same time I rather enjoyed reading it. As such I could have easily missed something. I forgot that I now know Friendly’s real name: Ar Quandomix. Who knows where that came from? I don’t remember writing it the first time but obviously I did. Marsupialese is supposed to sound Germanic (I think) or it’s construction is grammatically similar to German, probably Old or Middle German. I don’t remember. What is odd is that if someone were to ask, “Did you write this segment?” I would have to say that upon re-reading it reads familiar but I don’t really remember actually writing it. Someone else could have. I know better. Obviously I wrote it but I don’t remember. I like it though. If I hadn’t written the segment I would say, “I like it because I am comfortable with the presentation of the words and sentences.

         Add the segment and post. - Amorella

***

(final) Diplomatic Pouch 15 ©2014, rho GMG.One

            Meanwhile in other private apartments aboard Ship the other four have divided into pairs and are in their respective rooms. First, we listen in on Blake and Friendly's conversation. Diplomatic Pouch 16 continues with Hartolite and Justin.

            "What are you rubbing in your hand, if I may ask?"

            Caught off guard Blake responded by opening his left hand, "Oh, this?" (He stood slightly embarrassed.) "It was a gift from my father. He was a hunter. It is supposed to go on a key chain but I keep it for good luck -- like a rabbit's foot." (He showed it to her for the taking if she wished.)

            Friendly held it and felt the smoothness of the claw, thinking, this is like a ThreePlanet primate's fingernail. "What animal is this from?"

            "A bear. Dad killed the bear in the Canadian Rockies about twenty years ago. He had a silver clasp and hook made to hold the claw so it could be used as a key chain." Blake continued, "It is not the kind of luck you use for navigation on Ship, I am sure."

            "Luck. Mr. Blake, sometimes luck is all we have."

            Blake Williams was surprised by how much instant relief this comment brought. He responded, "Luck is something I am glad we share."

            Friendly dryly responded, "Good luck is better."

            Blake laughed and shook his head then asked, "I am interested in where Ship's electronic luck is located?"

            "Here, have a seat," said Friendly. "Like your chair the technology is in the floor or wall like you use insulation, but Ship's navigationanpower is built into the outer shell much like muscle and nerves. There are safety redundancies of course."

            Seated and relaxed Blake asked, "How many redundancies?"

            "Nine."

            "Nine safety redundancies for everything. Very impressive."

            "All are interconnected with lifesaving apparatus for every individual on board." She paused, "with you three given the priority."

            Blake was silent for a moment as he wasn't sure what if any words should come up. Finally he quietly said, "Thank you."

            "Our culture is built on being polite even when it is not necessarily expedient." Looking poker-faced, Friendly added, "You may take this as a weakness."

            Blake broke into laughter, "The thought had not yet come up." He then solemnly continued, "You don't want to come here. This is a very dangerous place. Very dangerous."

            Friendly replied, "We feel you three are not a threat."

            Again, relief hit Blake where it counts most in his spirit, his heartansoulanmind. He immediately felt very fortunate to be alive and to be with two other fellow human beings he loved very much. He unconsciously wiped away a single tear from his right eye, and in his quietest polite manner said, "Thank you, most kindly."

            "You have more questions, Mr. Blake."

            "Yes, but first call me Blake, please. It is more informal. This is a more personal question. My last name is Williams."

            Friendly smiled, "Yes, Dr. Williams. I was attempting to be more informal myself. I have read that some doctors try to relax their patients by having them call them Dr. and then their first name; but I thought Dr. Blake might still sound to formal and thus, 'Mr. Blake' because 'Blake' alone would be impolite as we have just met as we are."

            "You must have felt bad with your clever ruse of us early on."

            "Yes. We could not decide what to do. We came here to meet with Earthlings but who do you meet with first?"

            "With all the great leaders in our world, leaders in all the nations; surely you could have done better than us. We are not leaders."

            "But you are a family of adults."

            Blake smiled warmly, "We are not always adult-minded."

            "Neither are we. Both of our species are playful when we feel at ease."

            Both were quiet for a moment, a relaxed quiet. Friendly spoke, "Ship decided you three were fine for the purposes of first meeting." She hesitated, "Would you like to know my last name?"

            "I didn't know you had one. Yes, of course."

            "Lakenladybytherightstreamanfork."

            She laughed, "That's a translation. Here it is in sound Marsupialese -- Quandomix."

            "Friendly Quandomix."

            "Friendly would be Ar."

            "Ar Quandomix."

            She said, "Yes, it is strange hearing you speak in a Marsupialese voice."

            He said, "I would like to know more about you and your friends?"

            "What about Ship?

            "Ship too, but people first."

***

         Yesterday you and Carol had a good time at lunch with Cathy and Tod. Your nephew-in-law, Chef Joe M. surprised you both by picking up the tab on the banana foster desserts. – Amorella

         2108 hours. The whole meal was different and delicious. I am sure we will be returning with Kim, Paul and the boys one of these days. I think we spent about two and a half hours enjoying conversations at lunch. Afterward, we drove to Kim and Paul’s – Carol took a nap and Kim and I had a good talk, just like old times. She is my favorite daughter, no question about it. After awakening Carol and Kim drove to pick up the boys and once home we waited until Paul was coming home and went out to eat at a pub called Joe’s Original in the Kroger’s strip mall at the corner of Rt. 23 (Columbus Pike) and Lewis Center Road. Lots of people on a Friday night. We found a table in the back near other clientele with children. It was fun. This morning Owen wanted to eat at Bob Evans which we did, one is very close in south Delaware. Very good breakfasts. Afterward we stopped to pick up our overnight baggage and headed home and on the way we saw the beginnings of their house’s foundation. The footers are in and covered. It is difficult to picture a house above the footers. When we arrived home and filled up the car it posted 33.9 miles per gallon as far as the fill up. The car computer said 34 miles per gallon so that is pretty close. I drove a little slower up and back keeping the average between seventy and seventy-two. Before we left I already had a hundred and fifty miles on the car. It is still cold. This morning it was seven degrees when we started the car. More people passed us, but it was fine dropping five miles per hour from my usual on a trip to and from the Columbus area. We had a fun and relaxing two family fun two days. Plus, Cathy brought a half a dozen fresh oatmeal cookies she had made and when we left Kim and Paul’s Kim gave us six frozen Jennifer cookies from On the Rise Artisan Breads on Fairmount Blvd the last time she was in Cleveland on business. We all shared Cathy’s yesterday. When we arrived home rather than lunch Carol and I each had a Jennifer cookie and a glass of milk. Tonight we watched ABC and NBC News and last week’s “This Old House”. Carol continued on watching the Olympics. I caught enough of it on the news – beautiful and colorful videos. We had watched the Opening Ceremony Friday night after supper. The Opening always makes me hopeful for humankind; that we can continue to grow in our cultures and our humanity.

         Post orndorff. - Amorella