Don’t preach in our school, and we won’t think in your church.

L’année dernièr à Marienbad

Page Tags: Experimenting with Text,Never Ending Story,Last Year in Marienbad, Marienbad, Text Generator, Chomsky, Story Generators

Site Tags: Christendom The Star Deuteronomic history sun god Christianity Joshua svg art argue dhtml art Persecution inquisition Israelites CGText Site A-Z Marduk crucifixion

Text Generation

The Great Critic Speaks This page.
George Polti Plot Generator
Last Year In Marienbad Never ending story. Keep clicking it to find out what happens year after year at Marienbad!
Marienbad Muser: Plot generator Like the previous two mixed! More Polti than Marienbad
Literary Criticism Self generating literary criticism
Bishop Ecclesiasticus Christian-like babble
FIBA (Frederick Ignatius Baines Archive) More of the Holy Bibble
UK Lottery An Ajax application
Chivalry in the Rosy Cross Poor Markov Chain attempt
Who Wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen? Stylometry—Analysing Writing Styles
“GOD IS DEAD KILLED BY SCIENCE” How long would it take to generate this string by picking random letters? Not long with selection!

Abstract

Computer generation of text. Can it make any sense? Maybe. Maybe not. If sense is not the prime interest then it can fit its context quite well, seeming to make sense. Last Year in Marienbad is a Surrealist stream of consciousness, and the computer does it well. Religious babble does not have to make sense because it is in incomprehendable archaized language that sounds like God, and so can be seen as God speaking in mysterious ways. Most religious people accept what they read in their bibles as profound, though they cannot understand it. Literary criticism is someone’s opinion, and does not have to make sense to others, but does in bits. Literary essays are just bits of opinion strung together on a chain with little or no logic necessary. A common theme and the bits making individual sense of a kind seems to make sense in the whole. A computer can do that quite well. Check out Marienbad, our never ending story.

The Great Critic Speaks

Mr Eagle Terryton, in an oft quoted review in the Catholic-Marxist monthly, aptly wrote:

Let us continue to suppose that the national psychosis is powered by a general convention regarding the forms of the criticism. Of course, anyone that can disagree with well established conclusions could not have been referring to a controversial issue. To characterize a linguistic level, relational information seems incapable of recognising the complexity of the many faceted issue that is criticism. Obviously, a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds is unspecified with respect to the ramifications of postmodern thought. In the discussion of Byzantine diplomacy, following Gibbon, the earlier discussion of deviance is rather different from a symbol as potent as criticism in society today. Let us consider that the problem that surfaces in some circumstances does not affect the structure of a man’s shattered understanding of man. Primarily, the natural general principle that will subsume this case is rarely given rational consideration by the levels of acceptability from fairly high to virtual gibberish. Crossing many cultural barriers, it would have been felt strongly by a monster serious scholars as well as novelists try to tame. It must be emphasized, once again, that any influence on western science and literature will, for the foreseeable future, continue to follow the powerful influence of criticism. For those unfamiliar with Proust, the primary aim of demonstrating how adequate criticism is to be achieved may be subsumed by the issue as a worthy cause for examination.
Eagle Terryton, The Armchair Lefty

Click button to refresh The Great Critic:

Sense or nonsense? Sense to the postmodernist, for whom words mean anything you choose but otherwise nonsense! It is not, of course, a citation of Mr Terryton, it is far too meaningful, but an illustration of computer generated text simply by having four different files for four parts of a sentence that the computer picks from randomly to put a string of sentences together for a typical postmodern “critique”. They have been called Chomsky bots because the great philologist Chomsky showed how grammatical sentences did not have to mean anything. It shows that opaque and inelegant language can give the impression of meaning when it has none. The code is simple. Here it is for you to play with… The original programmer, John Lawler, whose website discusses the Chomsky bot, writes:

What I find interesting about it is how it just hovers at the edge of understandability, a sort of semantic mumbling, a fog for the mind’s eye.

That is what is fascinating, and makes you wonder whether what we write means anything at all. Much of it it probably does not! Lawler calculates that a Chomsky bot of five sentences such as the one he and Kevin McGowan wrote and have online, has 22,084,947,919,456,858,275,840,000 variations! The one on this page has many more, because the paragraph has more sentences and the generator has more phrases to play with, though they are less opaque and so the faults show more often. Though you will see the same components coming up over and over again, no full paragraph should ever be repeated to a single observer, and if it does, then you should have bought a lottery ticket! Kevin McGowan’s code in Perl is called fogcode.html, and is available to download from a search.

Here is another example, a funny page that writes an essay for you on any subject you enter, complete with citations and a graph.

Last uploaded: 31 March, 2009.

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Other Websites or Blogs

God’s Own Summary of the Bible—Magi Mike’s Blog
I explain here in a criticism of a book by F S Collins: “We will see that Christ gave two answers when asked for the most important commandment, and the reason is that the two… ”
Magi Mike’s Blog - http://mikemagee.wordpress.com/.
AskWhy! Blogger at Blogspot.

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The Wisdom of Carl

When a bishop from the American West prays for God to intervene and end a devastating dry spell, why is the prayer needed? Didn’t God know of the drought? Was he unaware that it threatened the bishop’s parishioners? What is implied here about the limitations of a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient deity? The bishop asked his followers to pray as well. Is God more likely to intervene when many pray for mercy or justice than when only a few do?

Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World (1996)

Website Summary

Before you go, think about this…

Careful tests of the efficacy of prayer have always failed even when Christians did the testing. Thirty top US astrologers could not identify someone's personality profile from their birth date. Belief in the supernatural and in religion is usually conditioned. It runs in families and peer groups. Such people want a simple explanation for everything, even if it is inadequate. Rather than admit they do not know, they will accept a supernatural explanation and they prefer easy childish explanations to proper ones that are too hard for their brains. Science hurts their brains, but God loves them. That is the distinction!