This 254 page book is an un-edited reproduction of the search queries of AOL user 23187425 from May 2006. This strange server log autobiography was found in the released AOL search queries by Thomas Claburn.

Half of the profit from each book sold will go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Published by Superbunker.

Now available for purchase at Lulu.

Show and Tell:

NPR: Paying Real Money to Win Online Games

David Byrne gets and RIAA warning (too much Missy Eliot in a 3 hour period)

Chatterbots (and the economics of invisibility)
The NY Times wrote a story about a video chatterbot called DiNA, but they’ve already hidden the story behind a paywall. (Here’s Grand Text Auto describing it).

Objects with Brains
What does basic generative programming have to do with your everyday life? Here’s Cory Doctorow in the NY Times today (read it quick) on programable logic:

The proliferation of cheap and cheerful programmable chips promises a new age of “whimsical logic,” chips that power devices whose functions are as delightfully impractical as their forms…

Media Suicide Watch: the Dead
The Grateful Dead has always had a policy of allowing fans to record and trade all their shows — it’s been one of the major factors in their popularity. Now that they’re rich, a couple of the remaining Grateful Dead rights holders have reversed that policy and are demanding that archive.org take down the high quaility recordings or makes them only available as un-savable streams. A lot of people find this incredibly sad and hypocritical….

More deranged anti-piracy action:
Don’t Copy That Floppy from 1992. The power of the scary rapper compels you!

And from the other team…
VCD Quality — a review site for pirated movies. Find the F1L3 n4M3z you want to download before you fire up your file trading app.

Visual Grammar of teh Web
Warning! This site contains images!

OMG ! Briliant Idea ! 1 !
Looking at this person’s idea for “Darwinian Poetics,” I had me an idea for a script similar to Hot-or-Not, Geek-or-Not, or Kitten War: Am I Poem or Not — rate a snippet of text for poetic value. Or maybe Poem War — two snippets of text appear, and the user the poetic winner. Make it so, Dan!

Work Directories
Now with name generators and newly spiffified.

Some things to consider:

Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries

Paris Hilton Bibliomancy

MacJesus ProGold

Political Compass

Pirate - Ninja -Dwarf - Elf

Second to last week…
How’s that class journal looking?

Feel the peer pressure…

Information Overload
Just in time for your tryptophan induced stupor, I compiled information about all the stuff we talked about last week: the Sony rootkit, text adventures, and chatterbots. Note the corresponding posts below. Click on the (more…) Drink in the sweet sweet knowledge.

In the news today:
This toy called Let them sing it for you. It takes what you type and turns it into an audio file comprised of words from popular songs. The artist who made it, Erik Bünger, is in to pluderphonics in general.

What’s Pluderphonics?
Glad you asked….

John Oswald is considered the originator of the term “pluderphonics”
Here’s a nice plunderphonics track of his: [MP3]

Other artists who use these techniques:
Negativland
People Like Us
Almost every DJ you’ve ever heard of…

Here’s a giant meta-mashup by DJ Food - Raiding the 20th Century [ MP3 ]

Alan Turing and the Turing Test (at Wikipedia)

The idea for the Turing Test came from a party game called the Infomation Game: a man and a woman go into separate rooms, and guests try to tell them apart by writing a series of questions and reading the typewritten answers sent back. In this game, both the man and the woman aim to convince the guests that they are the woman.

Chatterbots in General

ALICE
Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity

A. I. Nexus
With a Magical ALICE Unicorn Pony!

chatterbots blog

For those of you who love Python, here’s ELIZA in Python

Chat with ZOG!
Wait… ZOG? As in the offensive racist conspiracy,
Z.O.G.?
Or ZOGG? The endogenous retrovirus encoded onto a radio carrier wave in the 1800 kHz range?
But certainly not General Zod…
(Technology can be so very strange….)

Speaking of which:
Chat with TOBY!
Feel the hate…

Or for the more literarily inclined, read A Chat with “Penny” the Chatterbot (transcript)

Text Adventures
Play classic adventure games online (in Java)

The first computer adventure game: Colossal Cave
(”In memoriam, Stephan Bishop 1820-1857″)

Stephen Bishop, cave explorer (at Wikipedia)

More about the original caves and the origin of the Colossal Cave game, in the Inform designer manual

Interactive Fiction

Guides and overviews:

• What Is Interactive Fiction?
• Think like a player
• How to write a great interactive fiction game
• The Player will Get It Wrong

Interactive Fiction Competition
This was the 11th year…

Planet Sony: mapping the spread of the Sony Rootkit infection

More than half a million computer *networks* have at least one infected computer

It now appears that at least 568,200 nameservers have witnessed DNS queries related to the rootkit. How many hosts does this correspond to? Only Sony (and First4Internet) knows…unsurprisingly, they are not particularly communicative. But at that scale, it doesn’t take much to make this a multi-million host, worm-scale Incident.

Asia JPG
Europe JPG
United States JPG

Compare to image of lights at night (indicating population desnity)

Explaination of how the maps were made

More about the Sony BMG CD Rootkit infection:
Open Letter to Sony from the EFF
Wired: Sony Numbers add up to trouble
Rootkit timeline on BoingBoing:

Here’s where you can find your work directories:
http://machinepoetics.com/work/students-fall05/
This is where I’ll put your scripts so you can check the output. Maybe I’ll make the layout more pretty. Maybe I won’t….

The self-perpetuating prediction of Moore’s Law

The alluring musical recommendations of Last.fm

The Future Cost of a Good Synthetic World
If movies cost $100 million for maybe 10 hours of total entertainment, then an equivalent video game on an hourly entertainment basis could cost up to $13 billion. Given how much time and money people already spend inside of games, it’s kind of scary to think about what kind of virtual world could be created with a multibillion dollar budget….

The new USC faculty who are studying the biological basis of emotion.
They look like nice folks. (The stuff I heard about doing brain sensor focus groups was part of a radio interview…)

The Straight Dope on Mormons.
In his book An Address to All Believers in Christ, David Whitmer, one of the “three witnesses” to the Book of Mormon, writes:

I will now give you a description of the manner in which the Book of Mormon was translated. Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear, and another character with the interpretation would appear.

mexican circus
carrots and potatoes making whoopee transversely
wierded out condom

fluffy fuzzy squids
squids twirling intuitively
mexican balloon

horizontal flower
reason writing over the rainbow
oriental pillow

insatiable bread
newt go fasionably
insatiable hat

forgotten trash can
toothpaste fornicating gracefully
treacherous trash can

bored Virgin Mary
Canada layering passionately
creepy Canada

hoarse chicken patty
melted velveeta fetishizing too slowly
ignored cheezy poofs

hoarse chicken patty
cheezy poofs buttoning voraciously
old and fat dollop

alone cheezy poofs
egg mcmuffin pontificating softly
refusing molar

Beautiful Bowl
Hands Dance Closely
Intelligent Hands

Gorgeous Animal
Face Giggle Barely
Savage Animal

purple chocolate
piano animating shockingly
delighted puddle

delighted puddle
giraffe animating carelessly
happy bowling ball

filthy chocolate
mouse ovulating snuggly
delicious saddle

You need to make four lists, one for each part of speech:
nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives

After each item, you have to say how many syllables the item has. For example:
"tree", "1"

You can have multi-word items:
"the gentle tree", "4"

Each item must be inside quotes, followed by a comma which is outside the quotes:
"grass", "1", "flower", "2", "willow", "2", "leaf", "1", "mountain", "2"

Also notice that there are no “carriage returns” between words — this is all on one line.

Here’s an example of four lists:

nouns:
"grass", "1", "flower", "2", "willow", "2", "leaf", "1", "mountain", "2"

verbs:
"Moving", "2", "Swaying", "2", "Growing", "2", "Swinging back and forth", "5"

adjectives:
"in the wind", "3", "slowly", "2", "well", "1", "in the soil", "3", "very quickly", "4", "", "0", "very forcefully", "5"

adverbs:
"cool", "1", "green", "1", "pretty", "2", "amazing", "3", "beautiful", "3", "lovely", "2", "colourful", "3", "turquoise", "2", "", "0"

You should have at least 20 items for each of your parts of speech. More = better.
(That’s a minimum of 80 words, total. You can do it! Eye of the Tiger!)