'Up-Goer Five' text editor restricts writers to 1000 most commonly used words
(Phys.org)—Geneticist Theo Sanderson has written a simple text editor that allows a writer to use only words from a list of the 1000 ("ten hundred" since "thousand" isn't on the list) most commonly used words in the English language, to describe things. He calls it the Up-Goer Five Text Editor, in honor of a comic created by xkcd, to describe a Saturn V rocket, using only the most common 1000 words in the English language. Sanderson has made the editor available online for free, which intrigued bloggers, Chris Rowan and Anne Jefferson to the extent that they've set up a Tumblr blogger page called "Ten Hundred Words of Science," where they display the results of a challenge they've issued to scientists to describe what they do for a living using Sanderson's text editor. The results are thought provoking, interesting and quite often humorous.