australian/sokel hoax
Grant White
ulgw at dewey.newcastle.edu.au
Mon May 27 18:29:03 CDT 1996
Wasn't there a discussion list somewhere where the moderator interposted
machine generated letters and threads amongst real live human ones?
The capacity that the net now gives to put a hoax on foax leaves McAuley
and Stewart and Sokal's rather trite trick in the shade. Just how many
hoaxii could there be out there? And will we ever know?
GW
-- -
Grant White |
Multi-media & Special Collections |
Librarian | Internet:ulgw at dewey.newcastle.edu.au
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On Mon, 27 May 1996, Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt wrote:
> Eric on THE ERN MALLEY AFFAIR.
>
> > Fun to read, and a nice tack on the importance of the author and
> > his/her biography. Y'see, it turns out that these pomes they had created
> > were actually pretty good reading.
>
> Years ago, a friend of mine wrote a simple computer program (in basic,
> nogal) which churned out grammatically correct poems at the touch of a
> button. Some of them were nonsense, some were hylarius, others were
> really good. It just shows how (much) meaning is projected. What made
> the whole affair even funnier is that the poems were all in Afrikaans (which
> has a simpler grammatical structure than English) and since my friend
> couldn't speak Afrikaans (he had picked words out of a dictionary
> pretty much at random) he had to consult me to find out if the
> program worked.
> I'm quite sure that this is some kind of sophisticated postmodern
> analogy - now if only someone could explain it to me....
>
> hg
> hag at iafrica.com
>
>
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