Last Year in Marienbad
L’année dernièr à Marienbad. Computer generation of text.
Abstract
Text Generation
Contents
© Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Thursday, 5 February 2009
- 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
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:
Analogously, it can be defined in such a way as to impose success. Note that the problem that surfaces in some circumstances will demonstrate any criticism, both as necessary and sufficient. Contrary to the criticisms of learned colleagues current literary thought illustrates the primary concern of those involved with a controversial issue. This suggests that status, security, fame, all of this neurotic society, suffices to account for the best thing since Jane Austen. If the position of the vectorial trace in any movement is only relatively inaccessible to change, this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features has, in some areas, been seen to embrace a descriptive fact. Consider this, much excellent analysis will not insult the readers’ intelligence by explaining such a delicate subject. As long as peer pressure uses its power for good, this obvious comparison smells of a sad jest that conjures no such hilarity in admirers. Suppose, for instance, that Capitalism, red in tooth and claw, is not quite equivalent in any thought by the over 50s, who are likely to form a major stronghold in the inevitable battle for readers. Though criticism is a favorite topic of discussion amongst readers, novelists and publishers, the primary aim of demonstrating how adequate criticism is to be achieved is impossible to overestimate in its impact on the Wellhausian model but with greater emphasis on the outlying gross religious sentiment. Recent studies indicate the theory of syntactic features developed earlier may not be subsumed by our own everyday reality.Eagle Terryton, The Armchair Lefty
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.
