What's with the gibberish guys on usenet?

[Boris_B]

*Originally posted by Wendell Wagner *
**Boris B writes:

> Those are interesting references, but I would have
> trouble taking a book seriously with a title that
> included the phrase “An Historical”.

Check a dictionary. It’s acceptable (although not the most common usage) to put “an” before “historical”. It seems to be more common in British than in American English. **

You’re right. I should have put a little smiley face at the end of my post to indicate that I was being facetious.

[Chronos]

By the way, the Chomskybot could get a boost from an old program I wrote, called Garble, which I’ve since seen in a couple of different forms on the Web, but have lost my links to. It took a text, created a huge database of all the word triplets, and randomly generated an output text based on the triplets.

Isn’t that exactly how a Chomskybot works?

[DaveW]

Nah, Chronos, the Chomskybot described in Chas.E’s link (the only one I’ve ever seen described) says it’s got four fairly-short lists of phrases. It picks one from each, slaps 'em together, and that’s a sentence. The advantage of this over Garble is that you’re guaranteed grammatically-correct sentences if you select the lists correctly, but a Garble of Chomsky’s works would probably be more surprising in its output.

Garble starts by taking a text file, and counting the word triplets. The previous sentence has word triplets “Garble starts by,” “starts by taking,” “by taking a,” etc… It picks a word at random, then picks a second word at random, but which, in the original text, followed the first word at some point. For the third word, it’s got a list of all the two-word combinations, and the third words that follow each combo, and it picks randomly from that list. Then, the second word becomes the first, the third word becomes the second, and it picks a new third word just as above.

The “trick” to Garble is that in a large text, there tend to be lots of common two-word combinations that appear over and over, but with different words on each end. Two phrases, “cat in the hat” and “man in the moon” could become “cat in the moon” or “man in the hat,” or, of course, either of the two original examples. Both doublets, “cat in” and “man in” only have one third-word possibility: “the”. But the doublet “in the” has two possible third words: “hat” and “moon”, and Garble would choose randomly.

If you were to do four words, instead of three, there’d be a lot less garbling going on, since there aren’t nearly as many three-word combinations floating around in a lot of texts. If you drop it to two words, the output becomes much more like gobbledegook.

I found my code. At least, early code. It had problems with recognizing when it was inside a set of quotes or parentheses. What follows is a sample. I took about 37 Kbytes of Polycarp’s writing from his Why are Christians’ ideas of God erroneous? thread and Garbled them. Here are just a couple of paragraphs:

It doesn’t make sense. That’s not the case with me. And I’m perfectly well aware that certain religious festivals were so scheduled as to match popular pagan ones, and that any apparent inconsistencies lie in my thinking, and that any apparent inconsistencies lie in my opinion that combines both an allegiance to the mix). Mr. Billy or Navigator can state the supposed destination of such people according to evangelical Protestantism, but my hunch is that the issue of who wrote and edited the Gospels and whether they were or drew from eyewitnesses is still hotly debated. It’s at least as annoying for some scholar to lay down as the key point, and my own reasons for doubting the validity of what he had to say. But to keep this from turning into Mormon-bashing, I’d prefer to remain silent. I will, however, state that while the Bible as a touchstone in attempting to put together an interpretation. Certainly there are some portions that do not feel that every child is born into a world in which He had a sign in his office that said "Jesus came to his ideal of what a good person suffering, and then dying in agony. Absent the context of a spiritual aspect to reality beyond the sensorially accessible. And yes, emphatically, it’s the jerks that attract your attention.

Fr. Mychal Judge OSF, chaplain of FDNY, is an underlying message with themes of divine, self-sacrificial love and an ethical commitment to the extreme, and extrapolate the personality disintegration that results, and you have gotten beyond both fundamentalism and rejecting the whole system on account of its (fundamentalism’s) faults. Cliffy: I concur that the “original sin” business leads one to understand that nobody can be debated at length (and probably has!

Here’s some Garbling from my own The Economic Effects of a Psoriasis Cure article:

Over ten years, as well (once you’re cured, who cares if you die, you won’t be a heck of a start-up company that’s never sold any psoriasis drugs alone. For 1999, Eli Lilly (a company selling to 179 countries and employing over 30,000 people) reports a total sales income of just some “little guy” cooking up the drugs they manufacture, a patent expires. This opens the market at any given time - the one the pharmaceutical industry ‘forces’ on us due to generic versions in almost all cases, just because they’re cheaper.

The companies spend hundreds of millions dollars developing and testing the drugs they manufacture, a patent is for protection from the National Psoriasis Foundation’s FAQ on psoriasis.

No, the drug companies will conspire together, usually in some sort of “price fixing” scam, but this isn’t about something so pedestrian as price fixing). If one is highly successful with an asthma medication, then others who are also making asthma medications see less profits themselves, and this is one of three categories as far as conspiracy theories is that I believe, even though not stated explicitly, that the most common.

Great, now I’m having nostalgia for the long-ago days when all I had to spend my time on was silly stuff like this.

[labradorian]

DaveW, did you program before or after Lloyd Burchill’s “Deconstructor”?

I had mucho fun with that in the early 90s. Oh, for the good ol’ days.

[DaveW]

You mean this, labradorian?

Never heard of it before now. What’s it do? Garble-type stuff? The blurb at that link isn’t too specific.

I wrote the first version of Garble in the late 1980’s, shortly after reading an article on Travesties, which do what Garble does, except on the letter level, not the word level (Travesty programs can create non-English words, as well as truly horrid non-grammatical sentences).