On Cold Days

[da]

What do do on a blustery, -15 degree, flurrying day? d's answer today seems to be playing a lot of Civ. Mine has been to play around with computer-generated limericks and quilt squares.

I'm happier with the virtual quilt squares, which got turned into a christmas present: a large print with 10,000 patterns. 'Cause they asked, I hope to also turn it into an article for a quarterly Perl magazine some time in the next month.

The limericks suck.


there once was a sword-leaved from noil pschent
who stay sports neologize so blent
circumnavigate
sneesh black-figure prate
rail-line cockleboat privat-docent


Sigh.

The database I'm using doesn't have parts-of-speech, only meter and pronunciation, so the best it can do is nonsense words. Eventually, I'd like to work my way up to: providing as much as I could come up with on my own, and the program will suggest words to complete the lines.

Comments

[dpolicar]

I rather like "rail-line cockleboat privat-docent". Has a ring to it.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

*considers* You're right, I guess it does. :)

After a little time with google and dictionaries, I can pretend parts of it even makes some sense, aside from "sneesh" which doesn't appear in any real dictionaries I've found.

"noil pschent" would be a woven egyptian crown; "rail-line cockleboat privatdocent" could be some sort of rowboat following the rails, carrying a german tutor to his students...

*considers* Then again, maybe not.

[dpolicar]

Well, pretty much anything can be made meaningful if you work at it long enough. I point you to this by way of example.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Hee hee.

[for others reading along, I apologize but this won't make sense unless you go back and read Dave's example]

Well, "This colorless green idea sleeps successfully" isn't a paradox if you consider that a colourFUL idea is one that has been given nuance or interesting details- and the opposite of a colourful idea would obviously be a colourless idea. If it were green (new), I'd suggest it might even need to start out colourless- assuming it were logical/analytical/sequential and started out as a mere kernel that needed to be expanded and nuanced before it could be no longer considered green.

However. "This colorful green idea" - could that exist?

Could there be a brand new idea that springs forth fully formed, nuanced, shaded? I suppose that intuitive thoughts could (and ought) be so; the sort of right-brain creative, holistic ideas that you either "get" or you "don't get".

Leading me to wonder which is more likely to sleep furiously, a colourless or a colourful green idea?

[dpolicar]

Hm. I'd say that a detailed, nuanced thought that suddenly springs forth into your consciousness has typically -- perhaps necessarily -- gone through a long period of existing in a state you were unaware of... that is, it has for some time slept furiously. So I'd say that a higher percentage of colorful than colorless green ideas sleep furiously. But I don't know whether a particular furiously sleeping idea is more likely to be colorful or colorless.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

I was just about to say, I don't either.

But it occurs to me that of all possible ideas in the universe, those that aren't likely to ever be thought, are most successful at sleeping furiously.

So the more colour an idea has (you might even say "brilliance", although that is easily confused with genious, while what I'm aiming for is mere nuance), the more likely it is to continue slumbering furiously, now until the end of time.

Sort of rude of us, isn't it, to interupt their slumber?

[cyanpill.livejournal.com]

What database are you using for words? I'd have to look again forthe links I was going to use for my AI project, but there was a semi-famous DB of words with parts of speach somewheres... but pronunciation would be interesting as well.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

mobypron, from http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/Moby/

I wrote up a wiki page on it, for my local perl mongers group, which is the "limericks" link above.

[mynatt.livejournal.com]

Have you read The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter)? (There used to be a copy in the computer science club's library but it seems from their webpage that it's no longer in the collection, and I see the copy in Trellis is also listed as missing.)

It's been pretty cold here too. I'm happily anticipating next week's warm spell with forecast highs of -15° :)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

No, I'd not seen Racter or the book "it" wrote... Though, since it turns out to be written by a person, I'm less inclined to seek it out on basis of its novelty. :)

One of the graphics professors at the University (whose blog is mirrored here thingo_net) just might have a copy; he's quite interested in computer-generated poetry and pictures. So maybe I will look it up.

Oh, it's supposed to get up into low-single-negative digits here on Tuesday, which will be nice.

Had fun snowshoeing today, though I think that'll be a separate post.