australian/sokel hoax

[Grant White]

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

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Grant White                        |
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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
> 
>