Scepticism must be a component of our explorer’s toolkit or we shall lose our way. There are wonders enough without inventing any.

Carl Sagan

L’année dernièr à Marienbad

Text Generation

Transgressing the Boundaries This page.
The Great Critic Speaks This page.
Aphorism Machine This page.
Marienbad Abstracts of all the pages here
The Oracles of Jashub
Daily Literary Criticism
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
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!
Impeach the war criminals, Bush and Blair—draft letter for you to send

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.

Transgressing the Boundaries

The physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, to Social Text, a cultural studies journal. The journal published the article in its 1996 spring/summer issue. Sokal’s article, according to Richard York and Brett Clark (Monthly Review, 57, 9) presented “false statements, illogical arguments, incomprehensible sentences, and absurd, unsupported assertions, including the claim that there was in effect no real world and all of science was merely a social construction”. It was a parody of the type of “scholarship” common for postmodernists and some anti-science scholars on the academic left, who substitutes “word play and sophistry for reason and evidence”. Sokal was testing whether the editors of Social Text had any intellectual standards—whether they realized they were publishing nonsense as scholarship. They failed the test, exposing postmodern fruit loopery. Sokal and Jean Bricmont wrote about postmodern faddery in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.

York and Clark add that Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, published in 1994, inspired Sokal to perform his hoax, and that the Sokal affair, including the original article and many of the subsequent comments on it by a variety of scholars, is recounted in The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy, edited by the editors of Lingua Franca, the publication in which the hoax was revealed. But, though Gross and Levitt were right to criticize false scholars, they were unbalanced in only picking out the left for it. Pseudo Marxists like Michael Foucauld might have had a penchant for such dangerous frippery, but the right wing has a stronger tendency to disparage and misrepresent science and scholarship that they do not like, while the left wing has most consistently maintained its commitment to reason. The left should eschew postmodernism and anti-science as antirational fads.

The Great Critic Speaks

As an example the sort of “scholarship” being spoken of, here we print an item from an oft quoted review in the Catholic-Marxist monthly by Mr Eagle Terryton, who aptly wrote:

Thus the annual literary budget smells of the importance of criticism to developments in social conduct. We will bring evidence in favor of the following thesis, the notion of level of criticism may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate the credit it deserves for inspiring many of the world’s famous critics. At some stage or another, the upper echelon of progressive literary organisations unerringly illustrates success. To any learned ear, most of the methodological work in modern criticism would have sounded not unlike like such a delicate subject. Crossing many cultural barriers, one thing only would have been felt strongly by the traditional practice of scholars. It has been acknowledged that the descriptive power of the base component is unspecified with respect to an important part to play in the development of man. In order to understand further developments, the reader’s linguistic intuition may have shed some light on its place in society. If the position of the vectorial trace in any movement is only relatively inaccessible to change, the subject of criticism is not quite equivalent in its increasing relevance to understanding future generations. I suggest that it has no chance of ever being in the Wellhausian model but with greater emphasis on the outlying gross religious sentiment. For one thing, the situation that obtained just ten years ago will demonstrate results too clear to be ignored.
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.

Aphorism Machine

A fifth order Markov chain applied to the work of Kant gives us this fine aphorism machine—at the website Beetle in a Box.

Last uploaded: 02 May, 2010.

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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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Before you go, think about this…

In 1097 AD, the Christian Knights entered Jerusalem and in two days killed off everybody that had lived in the city—30,000 people.
“Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city… Not one of them was allowed to live. They did not spare the women or children. The horses waded in blood up to their knees, nay up to the bridle. It was a just and wonderful judgement of God.”

Crusader, Count Raymond of Aguilers