Will I stay or will I go?

Stand-by flying, holiday season, full flights, mild snowstorms, a relaxing lounge with fake trees and a green carpet. Only insights into real data and multi-factor probabilistic analysis might be able to give a valid prediction of whether I will manage to catch a flight tomorrow.

Since I don't have all that data, I'll simply fall back into what humans are so good at: superstition 😉

So here's my completely random analysis of some random corpora, to find out with high certainty whether or not I'll leave this airport tomorrow.

Say hello to the text-based flight oracle!

Preparing the oracle for service

In [1]:
import nltk
from nltk.book import *

*** Introductory Examples for the NLTK Book ***
Loading text1, ..., text9 and sent1, ..., sent9
Type the name of the text or sentence to view it.
Type: 'texts()' or 'sents()' to list the materials.
text1: Moby Dick by Herman Melville 1851
text2: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen 1811
text3: The Book of Genesis
text4: Inaugural Address Corpus
text5: Chat Corpus
text6: Monty Python and the Holy Grail
text7: Wall Street Journal
text8: Personals Corpus
text9: The Man Who Was Thursday by G . K . Chesterton 1908
In [3]:
all_texts = [text1, text2, text3, text4, text5, text6, text7, text8, text9]

Calling the oracle

The oracle is ready. Let's see what it will tell us regarding my immediate future...

In [4]:
for text in all_texts:
    print(text)
    text.dispersion_plot(["catch", "flight", "tomorrow", "stay", "another", "day"])

<Text: Moby Dick by Herman Melville 1851>

<Text: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen 1811>

<Text: The Book of Genesis>

<Text: Inaugural Address Corpus>

<Text: Chat Corpus>

<Text: Monty Python and the Holy Grail>

<Text: Wall Street Journal>

<Text: Personals Corpus>

<Text: The Man Who Was Thursday by G . K . Chesterton 1908>

Ouch! Nearly all the oracle's voicings clearly favor the probability that I'll have to remain for another day!

Not looking good!

Only The Man Who Was Thursday seems to allot me at least some chance of success... This actually has an interesting aspect that might be able to tilt the tide in my favor after all!!

In [13]:
from datetime import date
import calendar
today = date.today()
print(calendar.day_name[today.weekday()])

Wednesday

So while most voices of the flight oracle speak a clearly biased

"NO"

The Man Who Was Thursday gives me a

"you know... probably not. but MAYBE..."

And since tomorrow is Thursday, and since this whole thing is anyways staying in humanities great tradition of patter-finding and interpreting outcomes however we please - DRUMROLL - we have a result:

Flight's gonna take me on! 😜

Yay!