Slashdot Mirror
King James Programming
Jah-Wren Ryel writes "What do you get when you train a Markov chain on the King James Bible and a copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? King James Programming — a tumblr of auto-generated pseudo-scripture (or pseudo-compsci lessons). Some examples: -- 'The LORD is the beginning (or prefix) of the code for the body of the procedure.' -- 'More precisely, if P and Q are polynomials, let O1 be the order of blessed.' -- ''In APL all data are represented as arrays, and there shall they see the Son of man, in whose sight I brought them out.'"
It actually makes more sense!
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
They should use this to develop Jesix, or whatever it was called. You know, that Linux distro where they changed potentially offensive commands like "mount".
Some of the marketing crap my company produces is worse than the quotes generated in TFA. ...I wonder if I could make a business out of outsourcing our marketing team with this algorithm...I'll suggest to my boss and see what he says.
Scientology has a competitor! somehow, someone somewhere will take this way too seriously.
Used biblical references for branching tags. The code (assembly) would then have 'goto john', 'goto paul', etc spread about. It was pointed out to her that this made maintenance more difficult, and she needed to use more meaningful, informative tags. She did not, however, use 'hell' as one.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Also in the day of the LORD’s house, all the words of Alan Perlis, “Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.”
SICP is popular right now, but I'd hardly call it divinely inspired.
Required reading for internet skeptics
As a conservative-leaning, bible-thumping Southern Baptist, I find TFA and your (probably deliberate troll) response hilarious.
This has always been one of my favorite algorithms. Saw it the first time many years ago on The Practice of Programming, by Kernighan and Pike. Always makes me laugh. You can use it to generate phrases or even psuedo-words that "sound like" any given real language. I use it to generate passwords that are easy to remember but cannot be found in any dictionary, of "fantasy names" for games. Have fun and plose some stilture on your cince! http://www.ploodood.net/
As a scientist I always test the null hypothesis to quantify usefulness of my research. They did a bunch of work, but is it any better than a simple randomized selection of text?
As a quick test of the null hypothesis, below I have selected a random bible verse and inserted into the middle a random statement from SICP after the nearest to center semicolon, comma, period, and or or:
God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, this takes two arguments, a symbol and a list, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
And we have seen and, evaluating this combination involves three subproblems, testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.
Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, However, if we allow mutators on list structure, sharing becomes significant, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me the machine repeatedly executes a controller loop, changing the contents of the registers, until some termination condition is satisfied, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
Verses from: Random Bible Verse. I scrolled around the TOC with my eyes closed, clicked a link, then repeated the process waggling my mouse erratically to select sentences from SICP. YMMV.
It's not supposed to be novel, it's supposed to be funny.
In that, it succeeds quite well.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The Lord already took mercy on my soul when my ex-wife moved over 3000 miles away. Then "BoB" Dobbs came along with his pipe and helped me sort out the rest.
"You have never experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon."
Uhm, what exactly is this "unaltered bible". Even the King James verison, which is the closest there is to a "standard" bible for the English language...
Um, I'm pretty sure that the Bible was not written in English and that the King James version is a translation.
How about the "virgin Mary" which can just as well be translated as the "young woman Mary" from the (known) original? I give you that the same error is in the Septuaginta (the Greek "original" most translations draw from) and that due to this it has been elevated to dogma level, but the case stands: The Hebrew ha-almah (which appears in the prophecies of Isaiah that predict the arrival of Jesus) means just "young woman" and makes no claims about the sexual experience of said woman.
Not to mention that Isaiah made that prophecy in the present tense, not the future. But that's beyond the scope of this argument.
You might consider that a nontrivial translation error considering the fuss being made about the status of Mary's maidenhead (and the general fuss the RCC makes about sex in general).
If needed I can look up some more (some are really hilarious, especially when it comes to homosexuality or sex in general), but that's the only one I could remember.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It most likely would not change anything about the life of Jesus or how he is seen as some kind of "special" person. But it would change a lot on how religious people perceive virginity as something special. And no, "Behold a young woman shall conceive" is nothing special. And I somehow doubt that it was meant to be. Considering the value of women back in those days, I'd be very surprised if he wanted to draw much attention to Jesus' mother. It's actually a rather insignificant part of the prophecy, if anything, it's the lead-in rather than an important part of it. If you read the part (I guess we're referring to Isaiah 7:14 here, correct me if I'm wrong), you'll notice that the whole part about his birth seems more to have a temporal meaning rather than one of origin, that the future king is yet to be born and not already amongst them, rather than putting emphasis on him being born by that certain young woman|virgin. That's not the focus of the prophecy. It gets clearer if you read it in Hebrew, the meaning is rather one of a young woman who has not yet given birth. She may or may not be virgin, but the important bit is rather that this future king will be her firstborn, not so much the question whether she is virgin or not. The emphasis on the virginity is missing, the emphasis is on this future kind being her firstborn, something that was actually of high importance back then (compare for example the last plague of Egypt where all firstborn are killed, or Kain and Abel, where Kain is the firstborn and hence should be loved more than Abel, which leads ultimately to his jealousy, something that would by no means have been justified had he been the second born son).
But back to the change of effects this would have on the Church. It would not change the story much. Jesus would still be Jesus, no matter whether Mary is a virgin. What would maybe change, though, is our general moral situation and what we consider "moral" and "immoral". The emphasis on virginity would be much less. The same applies to other parts of the Bible where certain people, actions or omissions are allegedly "sinful", wrong or an offense to God. At any rate, I would not even remotely allow something like the King James version of the Bible be some kind of authority. Not even the Vulgata, not even the Septuaginta is beyond doubt. No matter what Pope or dogma says. Unless someone finds the original scripture, written by the original author who allegedly had some connection to God himself, doubt remains that errors were introduced by translation, or worse, deliberately added to further some agenda. Just think of the various Apocrypha written by "heretic" groups (especially common and popular amongst the Gnostics) where Peter, Thomas or even Judas allegedly wrote gospels that, surprise, surprise, further the Gnostic world view.
How can we be certain that something similar did not happen with the canon books somewhere in the millenia since their creation?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My point is that with every translation a change of meaning becomes a possibility. A translation is by its very definition entail an interpretation of the text, which invariably will lead to a change of pace and meaning, at the very least the emphasis changes. It's a bit like playing telephone. You can actually try it yourself provided you find a few friends who happen to speak a few different languages, let the first one draft a short text and have the others translate it. Now add the temporal difference between the original draft in Hebrew and the KJB which is literally millennia and you're dealing not only with different languages but different interpreters that have a very different world view and mindset, a completely different background and probably their own agenda in mind, too.
You want to rely on such a translation of a translation of a translation to be the verbatim word of God? After at the very least three humans had meddled with it (provided the original author had some divine inspiration), in three very different time periods with a very different outlook on the world?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... there was 0, and God said, "Let there be 1".