Well, it's what now - over halfway through the season and it's high
posting time on RRC - the rollercoaster world is at it's best.
Enthusiasts worldwide are hotly awaiting the announcements of next
year's big rides while still following up the loose ends of
construction of this seasons newfangled fads. And amongst it all I'm
locked up in a dorm at Drew university studying science at Governer's
school. Now, more to the point. Last night Rob Pike, famous for
writing a few programming books, and also an employee of many years of
Bell Labs, came to speak to us under the lecture title "On the
Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Program."

The beginnings were fairly innocuous - we had no idea what he was
going to talk about - a few overhead slides making fun of the internet
demographics that started in 1980 in academia and quickly expanded so
that "every misfit now has access." A few funny lines. Then, he
explained something about the history of this beast we call the
newsgroup - from USENIX on. Back in the early 80s, see, USENET was a
combination academic resource for computer dorks and seedlings of its
present self. Actually, the transition was a little more violent -
see, the groups of technical data exploded with a new class of college
freshman and the old rate of 3 or 4 messages per week increased
exponentially. Garbage was *everywhere*. Finally, a few groups opened
to make fun of it all, and Rob Pike was on top of it: he created a
group net.suicide on which the only rules were: "no discussion of
suicide." For a while it was a running joke, silly banter speckled
with occaisional newbies unwittingly submitting actual pleas for
help...

Then one day rumors sprung up as to how net.suicide actually started.
No one knew the Rob Pike of old and he watched amusingly as lore did
its job and stories popped up. He decided that the time had come to
take control. After fiddling with some failed algorithms, he and a
friend decided that they would hand-create a character in the style of
Dungeons and Dragons to regain power over their group. He took the
name Bimmler from a Monty Python comic and began posting ridiculous
slander with the goal of insulting man and even *name* as much as
possible instead of content. While a few people realized the scam and
sent him mail applauding the joke, a vast number of opponents spun up
shouting at him and criticizing him - they *believed* the character
despite the absolute garbage tales he spewed.

Finally, Pike got bored and since he and his friend created
net.suicide, on the old versions of usenet they could destroy it. They
did. That was the end.

Years later, though, Pike stumbled across a Markov algorithm that was
*just* what he was looking for: it took a massive source text and used
probability tables to figure out which words were most likely to
follow a given pair. For example, it would take the first two words of
the source text, "in the" and figure out what was most likely to
follow it. Lets say that "doghouse" was... Then, the next pair was
"the doghouse". With some minor modifications it produced some very
funny, if non-sensical, things. In fact, while the actual text had no
meaning - it was purely machine generated - the text flowed and had
much the same feel as whatever came before it.

Pike used the algorithm on the then net.singles (now soc.singles) by
compiling daily all of the messages and reposting whatever his
algorithm, which he posted under the name Mark. V Shaney from "Markov
Change" to the group. Interestingly enough, while Shaney recieved lots
of criticism, many believed he was real and lots just wanted to know
what drugs he was on: he was on topic enough that he was buyable -
people added meaning to whatever he said. So it goes.

The moral of this story, though there's more the story itself if
people are interested, is, I think, an interesting one for anyone who
uses newsgroups: there are a lot of weird people out there. There are
even some that aren't even people at all. So do what you like with the
garbage artists out there but realize that posting garbage is an
artform too. It's a strange game - don't play if you don't like the
rules. I don't.