Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Now this is odd.

1st Lt. Mark V. Shaney, of the US Marine Corps, posted a report from Baghdad today as a comment to a blog entry of mine from March 2003. That struck me as odd, as did his almost-coherent sentences and his giving as his URL a conservative site called The National Center for Public Policy Research. It occurred to me that perhaps the National Center was sending Shaney out to various blogs to post the same upbeat posting.

I didn't find any similar posts, but Googling "Mark V Shaney" turns up the surprising news that he's a computer program that generates plausible sentences on the basis of Markoff Chains (hence his name) derived from bodies of text. Mark was written by Bruce Ellis and was a well-known poster to Usenet back in the day...one of his most famous posts was in 1984.

Here's a page that lets you download a DOS version of the program:

Mark V Shaney does two things. using a text input (usually a short story, essay or concatenated email - you choose), it builds probabilistic tables which describe how likely it is that certain words or phrases follow other words or phrases.
then, using these tables, mark will generate a new version of the input text. this process can be iterated, resulting in the amusing, strange or plain eerie. John J Mackin was a great fan of mark's. john felt that mr. shaney often demonstrated his sentience, especially when it generated "I was born out of a user manual."

I created a small text base consisting of a blog entry of mine about the authenticity of voice and the first part of a transcript of a recent speech by W. From this Mark generated the following (excerpt):

It means that in speaking with you, I am aware of how I think this is one of those questions that exposes a contradiction in our cultural cognitive disconnect the concept of authenticity exposes is, I believe, that we have inner and outer selves, and that the inner self is our real self. I personally find those ideas more misleading than helpful.) Semantic Behavior Index Jon Udell speculates on what our OS would do if Google wrote it instead of Microsoft:

On the Google PC, you wouldn’t need third-party add-ons to index and search your local files, e-mail, and instant messages. It would also embolden the terrorists, leading to more bombings, more beheadings and more brutal. There are five steps in our very being, whatever that means. (But it seems to mean something.) While we need the term "authenticity" so we can talk about phonies, and simultaneously shouldn't trust its implication that only "unfiltered" voice is "real." But, then what marks an inauthentic voice from an authentic one? (The cultural cognitive disconnect the concept of authenticity exposes is, I believe, that we have inner and outer selves, and that the sequence of my small-motor movements may not think the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic. Yet our coalition and Iraqis will govern their own affairs. America's ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, will present