Hash
March 31, 2008
Joanna has sent me a kind of hash, apparently made out of my blog. It’s not good to read from beginning to end, but if you glance over it casually, as though to distract yourself from something else, there are some good parts.
Submit to Birkensnak a hot tub, or sex.
certified into a drawing foblog then I am enter a of random fiction attracted by the idecate at Amazon
(1)Remote Control Jod of good
“Binake checking accounents for our Birkens s a checking accountight, Birkensnake harkensnake.”
Something nice about making sense and then not making sense and then making sense again. I was noticing last week how it’s pleasurable just to understand something in the middle of things you don’t understand. Like if you’re walking down the street in a foreign country, say China, and all the signs are in Chinese, then it’s pleasant to see a sign in English and understand it. Even if it just says “SHOES” or whatever, and you don’t even need shoes. Or if you’ve just read ten stories where you can’t tell what the author is trying to say, and then you read a P. G. Wodehouse story, even one of the lesser P. G. Wodehouse stories, where the meaning of everything is very clear, that makes you feel good. Joanna’s hash, which I assume she generated with a machine, is probably more interesting than eighty percent of things written deliberately to entertain people.
I was playing a little bit with MegaHAL, which is a program that tries to have a conversation with you as though it were a person. The fun part is that you get to feed it the initial sentences from which it builds its brain. So for example you can give it Bishop’s lines from the script of Aliens,, and it will start talking like Bishop. It learns a little as you talk to it, and so the more you talk to it the more it will start to sound like you. What is the most interesting text to start MegaHAL off with? Just for fun I tried it with the blog-hash. I got this:
More american to me island but now livesat he is from rhode een me and him is th from somewhere elseyland), whereas i am likely to forge under a i am going to have for example, suppos eat the foam, agic or science? I de florets? Is that m the broccoli.
Shall I eat the foam?
On mondays ays i eat the no the different parts is, i start cookingy i prepare food now them whenever they m times and then eat of my meal at rando osed to go together.
Is there foam in the meal?
Is it g ? Is that why people emptiness & despairgain to break up the total panic absolut or something? Or is watch horror movies everyone would be back to whe sex started, and my hand as soon ass than five times ircourse; probably le ad to dream sex, i barises that might les a dream situation s to try to run us s at us in the meal?
Today I went to Boston and walked in the Public Garden.
Is there foam in the public garden.
There was no foam there. There were ducks made of metal.
Is there foam in the streey? People throw slop o change the channel and we are unable tdown in their jeeps, may begin to feel th it long enough you.
No fucking kidding.
No so on, whether they hat are simultaneousones, but the ones ts, the sort-of-good ake them out at nighy bad.
I remember the metal ducks being in a different place in the public garden, and also smaller. But I might misremember.
Also among ampire squid, is amois infernalis, the v er: the southern pudcies of tiny pudu dethem are the them in the public garden.
sweet
(By “america” i ue from wales or benind-bad.
If you want, you can download MegaHAL and my files and try it yourself. You’ll have to read the instructions, but it isn’t actually very hard. There are some other MegaHAL personality files on the same download page; it can talk like C3P0 or Ferris Bueller, it can talk in German; maybe it would be fun to mix the training files together, the blog hash plus Bishop, who knows?
March 31st, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Would you say that there are more ways to make nonsense than there are to make sense? I suppose this would imply that sense is sculptural, and that making it leaves most of potential sense-making material aside, as nonsense. Or is it the obverse: that there are many ways to make sense, but nonsense is just that: nonsense. I suppose you’d say that there are many different examples of nonsense, then, but only one kind.
March 31st, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Sense is all subjective and stuff, right? I mean anything can make sense if you’ve decided what sense it will make. Even if I don’t understand Chinese the same way Chinese people understand it, I could develop my own interpretive framework for it, and then it would make personal sense to me. So then the way to think of it isn’t as a sense/nonsense binary, but as a shared-sense/private-sense spectrum: how much does my understanding of this thing seem to agree with others’? That’s maybe part of the pleasure of finding bits of simple shared sense in a deliberately messed up text: the messed-upness forces you into a kind of hermeneutic solitude, because you know there’s no common way to interpret what you’re seeing and any interpretation you make will be yours alone; and then when you come across a thread of shareable meaning you have the strange momentary feeling of being simultaneously alone and not alone.
Don’t people write books about this crap?
April 1st, 2008 at 3:12 pm
I think lots of people write books about that crap.
What if sense/nonsense followed the 2nd law of thermodynamics which expresses the ever increasing level of chaos (nonsense) in the universe. Meaning, at some point, there would be nothing but nonsense. In fact, every day in this universe would be a step towards less sense, and more nonsense. A very slow march towards total nonsense. I hope it comes soon; making sense is getting old.
April 8th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Happy Birthday.