One of the funniest spoof papers I read in the 1980s was entitled “Toward the Automatic Generation of Excuses”. I thought that there was a germ of an idea there — in that if we could design a program that could generate plausible excuses then we would have taken a useful step on the road towards truly intelligent AI. But now here’s something even better — an engine for generating postmodern essays. Some details from the footnotes:

“The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator. To generate another essay, follow this link. If you like this particular essay and would like to return to it, follow this link for a bookmarkable page.

The Postmodernism Generator was written by Andrew C. Bulhak and modified slightly by Pope Dubious Provenance XI using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars.

This installation of the Generator has delivered 436593 essays since 25/Feb/2000 18:43:09 PST, when it became operational.

More detailed technical information may be found in Monash University Department of Computer Science Technical Report 96/264: “On the Simulation of Postmodernism and Mental Debility Using Recursive Transition Networks”. An on-line copy is available here. ”

News.Com: AOL blocks instant messaging start-up. An elaborate game of cat and mouse has developed between AOL and Trillian creator Cerulean Studios–as the start-up has repeatedly released new software designed to get around the block, prompting AOL to rush in and stop people from using it.

At last, an answer to the question: how does Google make money? According to this interview with its CEO, half of its revenues come from selling those discreet ads, and half from licensing its technology to companies like Yahoo.

In OSX, Command-Shift-3 will take a screen shot just like the Mac has done for years and years.

Very nice Salon piece about the parallels between the US government’s campaign against terrorism and the recording industry’s campaign against peer-to-peer file sharing. Not quite Swiftian, but not bad…

So how much electricity does the Internet really use? “Some analysts, bolstered by a study declaring that the Internet is responsible for fully 8 percent of all national electricity consumption, assert that the Net itself is responsible for spiking demand to unprecedented heights. The new economy, it seems, is an energy hog. Never mind that other researchers have debunked the 8 percent figure as absurdly inflated. President-elect George W. Bush has already touted it in discussing his energy policy. What better reason could there be to allow oil drilling and coal mining in virgin wildernesses than the need to keep the Net running?”

Interesting article on Blogger.com and the weblogging phenomenon generally, based on an interview with Evan Williams, the founder and proprietor of Blogger.com.

One of the unremarked aspects of the Enron scandal is the way the fearless US media (not to mention its UK counterpart) failed to detect that the company was a financial sham. Christopher Hitchens made this point brilliantly in his Guardian column yesterday. He says the story was finally blown by Bethany MacLean of Fortune magazine — ‘ the very model of the bright-eyed girl reporter. And that brings one to another element: the almost complete failure of the press to do its job of investigation and disclosure. MacLean happened to be an expert at figures and the reading of balance sheets: she saw some numbers that didn’t add up and asked, just like the child viewing the unclad emperor: “How does Enron make its money?” Up until then, the whole of the business press had been in slack-jawed awe of the company’s mighty attainments. And Enron used a lot of muscle to get that little story downplayed. So the current media circus conceals the fact that the journalistic profession is playing catch-up, to compensate for a long period of inertia and incuriosity. ‘

What’s this? A respectful piece about Linux on CNN!

Very good column by Rick Boucher on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which explains, in a short piece, exactly what’s wrong with that pestilential statute. Some quotes:

‘Section 1201 (a)(1), for example, prohibits unauthorized access to a work by circumventing an effective technological protection measure used by a copyright owner to control access to a copyrighted work. Because the law does not limit its application to circumvention for the purpose of infringing a copyright, all types of traditionally accepted activities may be at risk. Any action of circumvention without the consent of the copyright owner is made criminal.

Consider the implications. A time may soon come when what is available for free on library shelves will only be available on a pay-per-use basis. It would be a simple matter for a copyright owner to impose a requirement that a small fee be paid each time a digital book or video documentary is accessed by a library patron. Even the student who wants even the most basic access to only a portion of the book to write a term paper would have to pay to avoid committing a crime.

The day is already here in which copyright owners use “click on” licenses to limit what purchasers of a copyrighted work may do with it. Some e-book licenses, for example, prohibit the reader from reading the book out loud. Some go so far as to make it a violation of the license to even criticize the contents of a work, let alone to make a copy of a paragraph or two.’