Shakespeare 2.0

Forget 1000 monkeys, could a PC write Shakespeare?

There are very few authors who don't use a personal computer to compose their works but, what if the computer could write a book on its own? That's precisely what a piece of software called MEXICA aims to do, and in fact is doing. MEXICA, developed by Rafael Pérez y Pérez, is a computer program capable of authoring stories all by itself.

MEXICA's work isn't half bad if you believe blind comparisons between it and the work of a human author. According to The Discovery Channel, "in an Internet survey that pitted the computer-generated stories against other computerized stories, as well as stories written solely by a human, readers ranked MEXICA's stories highest for flow and coherence, structure, content, suspense and overall quality." That may be due to MEXICA's editing skills.

As MEXICA works it analyzes emotional content and connections between characters. As the program's author describes it, "the program views a story as interesting when tension levels increase and fall throughout the piece. If the program finds that the story is boring or incoherent in places, it will replace or insert atoms until a version is deemed satisfactory." So, in essence, MEXICA keeps writing and rewriting until it is able to satiate its own internal yawn-o-meter.

Drawing on key elements of human creative writing process, the thought behind a system like MEXICA is baffling. Pérez y Pérez hopes that MEXICA will help us write better stories, but doesn't necessarily see a program like MEXICA replacing the craft of an actual, human, writer.

No, cause that's, like, crazy talk, right? Right?

Attack of the killer toboggan hills

What a remarkable coincidence...

As debate continues over whether helmets should be mandatory for tobogganers, emergency officials in the Toronto area responded to more than a half dozen sledding injuries over the weekend...

The injuries underline a debate over a helmet law for tobogganers.

I say again: what a remarkable coincidence: all these injuries, on precisely the weekend that the media have elected to make this an issue. The only conclusion we can draw is that tobogganing has suddenly become much more dangerous than ever before, at least if you happen to live in a major media centre like, say, Toronto.

Why, it's almost as if the hills have eyes... as if they've been lying in wait for this moment... as if they'd planned this... All the latest hysteria here.

Two cheers.

Market forces will determine distribution of Boeing benefits, PM says

The Harper government has avoided a repeat of the 1986 CF-18 debacle by thwarting Public Works Minister Michael Fortier's efforts to increase Quebec's share of the economic benefits flowing from a $3.4-billion military purchase.

"This government and our ministers have no intention of interfering in the regional distribution of the contracts," Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters yesterday afternoon.

Laying down the law, Mr. Harper said it is up to market forces to determine which companies would receive benefits flowing from the government's purchase of C-17 cargo aircraft from Boeing Co.

"It depends on the company that has the contract and its relations with other industry players," Mr. Harper said.

Points to Harper for reining in Fortier -- though why he was allowed to indulge his appetite for pork for so long, at such cost to the government's reputation, is a question, as is why the government exempted itself from the Agreement on Internal Trade, which was supposed to make such regional favouritism a thing of the past. And points as well to the ever-impressive Maxime Bernier, who is emerging as the free-market conscience of this government.

And yes, for those of you who were kind enough to point it out, it does rather take the sting out of my Friday column, written before the statement was issued. Though as I say in the piece, it's the whole domestic benefit test that should be tossed out. Paging Minister Bernier...

Community of communities

Great piece by the Post's Melissa Leong on the annoying proliferation of "community" as the unspeakably polite label for every conceivable trait, hobby, ethnicity etc.

So it is that there is now the clubbing community, the composting community, the conspiracy theorists community; and online, people form the "diaper-lover community" (often associated with the "adult baby community"), the fans of MacGyver community and the cigar aficionado community; and there would be 1.2 million hits on Google for the seemingly nonsensical phrase, "world community."

In the past week alone, the CBC has used the phrase "sex-trade community" in its coverage of the trial of Robert Pickton, the Toronto Police Services announced it was launching an educational campaign targeting the "questioning community" (as distinct from the gay, lesbian, transgender communities), and the Globe and Mail, in a story about men who copulate with horses, referred to the animal-sex community -- without any sense of irony or even the use of quotation marks or italics. The National Post has written stories citing the "education community" and the "investment banking community."

It's a form of euphemism by circumlocution: by taking a longer time to say it, we think we're showing more respect. Call someone a "Jew," and you are plagued by self-doubt: doesn't it sound a little anti-Semitic? Call him a "member of the Jewish community," and you are on unassailably respectful grounds.

It's nonsense, of course -- mush-mouthed, cloying, and most often inaccurate: there is no "composting community," in any meaningful sense of the word. It asserts a commonality and sense of identity that exists only in the minds of activists for various causes and the toadying journalists who oblige them.

More helmet propaganda. 

Noggins on toboggans need helmets, say brain-injury experts With the winter finally in place and snow firmly underfoot, the time of the year has arrived where kids across the country, with or without parental approval, spend their days sliding down hillsides. The question is whether kids should be wearing helmets when doing so, considering an estimated 2,000 children are injured every year - a figure that only refers to those who go to hospital - in sledding-related accidents. Brain injury and safety experts from around the country say that it may be a foolish move for Canadians not to take the issue of playing safely on their sleds more seriously.

Source? Are those head injuries, or all injuries? Among head injuries, how many were to the face, where the helmet offers no protection? (Make them wear visors!) Among other head injuries, how many were more than a minor bump? Among the more serious, how many would the helmet have prevented? And what allowance has been made for the well-documented phenomenon of "risk compensation," where the increased feeling of safety from the protective equipment induces people to take greater risks than they otherwise would? Nothing. Just: "an estimated" 2,000 kids with some sort of injury. Ergo, wear your helmets. Feh.

I think what we need is the personal liberty equivalent of one of those legislated "pay as you go" rules, familiar from debates over fiscal policy, where any tax cut must be offset by an equivalent spending cut (and any spending increase by a tax increase). Thus, any new law that proposed to add to the state's control over citizens' lives would have to be offset by the deletion of an old and similarly meddlesome law; every subtraction in freedom would be balanced by an addition (though the opposite would not apply).

Housekeeping

I've moved the columns into their own "columns" directory, both the monthly archives and the individual pages. So what was previously found at, for example,

http://andrewcoyne.com/2007/01/selling-conservative-soul.php,

will now be found at

http://andrewcoyne.com/columns/2007/01/selling-conservative-soul.php.

This will have many benefits down the road I won't bore you with, but will, alas, make obsolete any links to the pages concerned. I'll leave the old pages where they are for now, but eventually they'll be deleted. Please note: this affects only those items identified as "columns," for example on the Columns page or under the "Recent Columns" head at right, and not regular blog posts. NB: The columns feed, confusingly, remains in the main directory. Thus

http://andrewcoyne.com/columns.xml.

Didn't seem necessary to move it, versus the upset it would cause.

On the other hand

This looks promising:

Environment Minister John Baird questioned the wisdom of tax incentives introduced in the 1990s to boost production in Alberta's oilsands, and hinted yesterday the Conservative government might have more to say on the issue when it tables its spring budget... "I cannot explain why the Liberal government of [new leader Stephane] Dion made these changes," Mr. Baird said...

Senator Porkier

I give up.

The delivery of Canada's first military cargo aircraft faces delays while Boeing is embroiled in a backroom battle with Public Works Minister Michael Fortier over Quebec's share of economic benefits flowing from the $3.4-billion purchase. The negotiations, which were scheduled to close last month, are running into overtime and jeopardizing the plan to deliver the first of four C-17 aircraft to the Canadian Forces in June. To obtain the contract, U.S.-based Boeing Co. has to pledge to buy supplies and services worth the exact value of the purchase in Canada. This package of regional benefits can be spent directly to build or maintain the Boeing C-17s, or any other current and future Boeing aircraft. With billions at stake, Boeing is facing political pressure to invest heavily in Quebec, where 55 per cent to 60 per cent of Canada's aerospace industry is located. But the company plans to spend only 30 per cent of the economic benefits in the politically sensitive province, while directing the rest to other provinces, industry and government sources said... A number of Quebec businesses and politicians -- including Mr. Fortier -- are fighting to boost the province's share of the regional benefits. He hasn't publicly set out a target for Quebec's share of these economic benefits, but he is staunchly defending the industry that is mainly located in the Montreal area. Mr. Fortier, an unelected senator, will be running in Vaudreuil-Soulanges, just west of Montreal, in the next election. As Public Works Minister, he has the final responsibility for signing the contract.

In the twenty-odd years since the CF-18 debacle, Conservatives have apparently learned nothing: about economics, about political morality, about playing fire with regional jealousies. That a Conservative government would still be inflating the cost of military procurement contracts by insisting on domestic "industrial benefits" offsets is bad enough: it's just pure protectionism. (We tax ourselves to overpay foreign suppliers for military aircraft. Then we use the proceeds to make passenger aircraft here, and tax ourselves again to subsidize their sale overseas. That's some investment strategy: buy high, sell low.) But that Fortier would be sticking his finger in to steer more of the pelf towards his home province is just unforgivable. I say again: Have these people learned nothing?

They're cutting into the bone!

People magazine’s article this week on Britney Spears and her “new guy,” model Isaac Cohen, is five paragraphs long. It was reported and written by seven people. To be fair, they were long paragraphs.

-- New York Times (As Time Inc. Cuts Jobs, One Writer on Britney May Have to Do) MORE: Former People staffer Jeff Jarvis has some equally sympathetic reflections.

It had to happen sometime

"Springer" bodyguard gets own talk show

Steve Wilkos, a former Marine and cop, will offer advice and "dole out his own version of justice" on the as-yet-untitled show... Wilkos, who will leave "Springer" after 14 seasons to take on his new job, said: "I really like helping people."

Breaking news

ABC News: Fire in Man's Pants Not Started by Phone

Honesty is so last year

My Wednesday column is on the deep cynicism of the Conservatives' new green strategy -- cynical, not because the Tories don't care about global warming -- though who knows? -- but because in their zeal to be seen to be "doing more" about it they are embracing policies they know won't work.

Bases covered

Should floor-crossers like Wajid Khan be banned outright? No, says my Saturday column. Should they at least have to submit their decision to their constituents' approval in a byelection? Maybe. What if they cross the floor to take a cabinet post, a la Emerson and Stronach? Well, in that case, yes.

This is exactly how slavery started

Cheri DiNovo, MPP tears my minimum wage column to shreds.

Dual partisans

Wajid Khan's defection to the Tories is old news, of course, after Stephen Taylor's world exclusive of the previous day. But I couldn't help noting Stephane Dion's take on it:

After Khan and Harper made the joint announcement, Dion released a statement saying it was “with regret” that he received the news. “As a member of the Liberal Party of Canada, I was never comfortable with Mr. Khan serving as an adviser to a Conservative Prime Minister, as Mr. Khan has done since August of last year,” the statement read. “As Leader of the Party, I felt it imperative that he decide to which party he would ultimately be loyal. Mr. Khan has now made that decision.” On Thursday, Dion said publicly that Khan should make a decision about his loyalties. "You can't have a foot in the government and a foot in the opposition," Dion told reporters yesterday.

No, indeed. The idea's absurd. It's like, I don't know, being Prime Minister of one country and a citizen of another. UPDATE: It's encouraging that Khan was not given a cabinet post or other inducement to cross the floor, unlike the Stronach and Emerson affairs. But should he be so honoured in the future, people will naturally wonder if that sound they hear is the other shoe dropping. As before, the best course would be for Khan to consult his constituents, the ones who sent him to Ottawa as a Liberal less than a year ago, via a byelection.

My take on the cabinet shuffle

For what it's worth.

At last the flying cars

Your mileage may vary. (Via Damian).

Happy New Year! Whoo-hoo! Happy -- what? Oh.

In lieu of actual year-end posts, and about four days late, here are a few year-end columns from years past... This millennium has seven days (December, 1999)

My perfect year (December, 1997)

Christmas week: a complaint (December, 1996)

I wish I had said that! (I will, I will.) (December, 1995)

Should auld traditions be forgot (December, 1989)

Oh, and my first column of this year is up, which in a daring departure looks ahead to the coming year in politics. Fun fact: the last time there were federal, Ontario and Quebec elections in the same year was in 1908. Which probably means it won't happen this year, either.