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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.
SICP is popular right now, but I'd hardly call it divinely inspired.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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?
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.