Monday, February 28, 2005

the Scandroid Arrives

It's a program that scans iambic pentameters. It does a good enough job that its mistakes are interesting. It's available for Mac (OS 10.3 only) and Windows:

Download the Scandroid



The Manual is also available there as a separately downloadable PDF file (it's included in the Mac and Win downloads too).

This is version 0.2a. Version 1.0 is in the works, and it offers important additions and improvements. Most important, it will handle other meters, anapestic ones in particular. Figuring out how to decide — how we decide — whether a line is anapestic or iambic is difficult enough to constitute a reason for writing the program. I'm collecting other questions that the program raises. If anyone finds others, and of course if anyone finds bugs, I'd be very glad to hear.

The program is published under a GNU Public License. The source code (in Python) is available on the same site as the program itself.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Announcing: the Scandroid

It's a program that scans iambic pentameters. It does a good enough job that its mistakes are interesting. It's available for Mac (OS 10.3 only) and Windows: http://cherry.conncoll.edu/cohar/COH%20programs%20page.htm. The Manual is also available there as a separately downloadable PDF file (it's included in the Mac and Win downloads too).

This is version 0.2a. Version 1.0 is in the works, and it offers important additions and improvements. Most important, it will handle other meters, anapestic ones in particular. Figuring out how to decide — how we decide — whether a line is anapestic or iambic is difficult enough to constitute a reason for writing the program. I'm collecting other questions that the program raises. If anyone finds others, and of course if anyone finds bugs, I'd be very glad to hear.

The program is published under a GNU Public License. The source code (in Python) is available on the same site as the program itself.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

        Hole Up

February's made
me think
on it, why
up--hole
out, or in of
course, or
down, at least.
Myself am
hole, nor am I
out of it.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Politics of the Random

The Sinking Ark (2)

Steven Levy, an editor at Newsweek, gets an iPod Shuffle and finds that it keeps playing his Steely Dan cuts in preference to everything else he's put on it. Being a Newsweek editor with Clout, he calls Steve Jobs, who tells him that the random-choice algorithm has been rechecked and validated. Being no dummy, Levy next calls a mathematician.

The mathematician lets Levy in on an open secret: our brains can't do random, and what's more, won't do it. They (which means we) would rather posit a pro-Steely-Dan conspiracy among the chips in the iPod or back at the Apple factory or in the basement of the White House than acknowledge that a genuinely random sequence usually seems to us full of pattern and meaning.

Michael Gazzaniga, who spread the word about split-brain research back in the seventies, published an article in the July 1998 Scientific American called "The Split Brain Revisited." He recounts a wonderful experiment at Dartmouth in which commissurotomy patients' separate brain hemispheres are each presented with a weighted random stimulus: two lights, one of which flashes 80% of the time and the other 20%. The right hemisphere quickly settles down to gaily guessing top top top top top, and a success rate of 80%. So does a rat. The left hemisphere won't quit; it clings tenaciously to the idea of a pattern, constructs elaborate systems of prediction, and never gets above 68%. It knows somebody in there is pushing Steely Dan. From the left hemisphere's point of view, the right hemisphere's behavior is mindless.

The most vicious and stupid manifestation of the Steely Dan Maneuver, or the stupidest and most vicious on display this morning, is the campaign to teach "Intelligent Design" alongside the stuff Darwin pointed out 150 years ago. The fundamental argument, of course, is that randomness just couldn't produce something as complicated as life, the eye of the octopus, Steely Dan, or the Kansas Board of Education. My own hope is that Kansas will enact this "educational" policy, because I'm in favor of intellectual and financial resources moving from the middle of the U.S. toward its edges—as Garrison Keillor remarks, state lotteries are a tax on people who weren't that good at math—but I realize this is provincial, so I regret hoping it.

The best thing about the SDM, on the other hand, is described this way by Gazzaniga: "Our uniquely human skills may well be produced by minute and circumscribed neuronal networks. And yet our highly modularized brain generates the feeling in all of us that we are integrated and unified. How so, given that we are a collection of specialized modules? The answer may be that the left hemisphere seeks explanations for why events occur. . . ." In a word, that rabid left hemisphere fabricates our sense of having a self. (And this is the best of the SDM?) Theories of God couldn't have been far behind, a few decamillennia ago. That would make the Kansas argument well and truly and cosmically circular.

Saturday, February 05, 2005

Watch This Space

Most of my past month (between semesters) has gone into work on the Scandroid, a program (Mac and Windows) that scans iambic pentameter. A usable first version, though still very much alpha stage, is almost ready. I'll post links for the executable and source code when they're ready; and a series of notes on the implications of the program and its methods would make as much sense here as anywhere.

It's not the first time I've written such a program. My Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry, a book that's been out of print for a few years, mentions in passing a very early version of "the Scansion Machine." This one builds on that, but I goes farther, does better, and at least in my thinking about it, goes deeper. Incidentally it is as far as I know the most successful program around at the specialized thing it does: producing traditional-looking scansions of English metrical verse.

More soon! Stayed tuned! Alert the press & don't let the kids go to bed!