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Manley Hubbell Shutdown?

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Joe Manfre

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Jun 7, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/7/00
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This article was published in The New York Times on Wednesday,
June 7, 2000, page C1.

Ohio's 'Manley Hubbell' Computer Could be Shut Down

By F. CLAIBORNE ROBERTS


CLEVELAND, June 6 -- "Manley Hubbell," a popular fictitious
Internet character whose sometimes inscrutable messages are
generated by a computer at Case Western Reserve University here,
could be shut down by the end of the year due to a lack of funding,
the character's creator said today.

Scott S. Henston, a professor of computer science at Case Western
Reserve, created the character to serve as what he described at
the time as "a joint project combining the most experimental realms
of computer science and literature."

The algorithm that creates "Manley Hubbell" does so by compiling
all the messages created by other Internet users then stringing
together portions of them in a way that sometimes approaches
lucidity.

"The beauty of 'Manley' is that he sometimes almost seems to
make sense," Dr. Henston said in an interview today. "Sometimes
what comes out of him is complete gibberish, but at other times
you get the feeling that he's a person who's just operating on
a higher level than you and me."

"Manley Hubbell" posted its messages on Usenet, a system of
Internet chat rooms created and maintained by New York-based
Deja.com Inc., whose stock price plummeted 9.3 percent on the
Nasdaq Stock Market after traders learned of the possibility of
the shutdown.

"The loss of 'Manley Hubbell' would be a harsh blow to the Usenet
community," said Deja.com president Francine Columbus, who
reportedly will meet with Case Western Reserve officials this week
to discuss the funding issue, including a possible Deja.com bailout
of Dr. Henston's project. "I know I'm not the only user of
Deja.com's services who looks forward to every message 'Manley'
posts."

Dr. Henston, an avid student of contemporary literature, also
programmed "Manley Hubbell" to make creative use of punctuation --
using the symbols as an artist wields a paintbrush, to create
interesting images on the page. The poet e.e. cummings was a key
inspiration in this factor, Dr. Henston said.

"He once based a poem on the way a lowercase 'L' was used on
typewriters in lieu of a numeral 'one'," Dr. Henston said of
cummings, who died in 1962. "This gave me the idea to do a
similar thing using punctuation as dividers of text and to serve
other purposes when 'Manley' writes."

Sections of "Manley Hubbell" text would sometimes be split up
by rows of question marks, often alternating with virgules,
while stretches of colons -- sometimes ending with a word
or simply an uppercase letter -- would make horizontal lines
across the page. Another key attraction for many Usenet
participants was the way "Manley Hubbell" would create
incomprehensible charts and graphs out of random data culled
from other Usenet posts.

According to James Parry, a humor writer who helped to popularize
"Manley Hubbell" on the Usenet by republishing the messages in
other chat rooms with his own clever commentary, "Manley Hubbell"
would often start several sections of text with the same word,
such as a lowercase "ok," but append numerals to the word
that would increase each time the word was used.

"The first part of a 'Manley' post would start with 'ok,' then
later you'd see a paragraph start with 'ok2,' then there'd
be an 'ok3' even further down in the post," Mr. Parry, of Boston,
said. "In between all that would be question mark-slash-question
mark, slash-slash-question mark, and so on, and of course a
couple of huge charts. It was one of the most postmodern pieces
of art I've ever seen."

One threat to "Manley Hubbell," Dr. Henston acknowledges, is
the possibility that a human Usenet participant who also made
little sense might feed data into "Manley Hubbell" that would
have unpredictable results, since the program was designed
to turn lucid posts into abstract ones.

"The whole thing could break 'Manley' down, or for all I know,
might generate something comprehensible," Dr. Henston said with
a laugh. "I used to joke that combining 'Manley' with one of
the human 'kooks' on Usenet might end up generating the full
text of 'Hamlet'."

The fear of allowing the less-comprehensible Usenet participants
to affect "Manley Hubbell" led Case Western Reserve's campus
police to force one Usenet participant, a South Dakota resident
named Archimedes Plutonium, off of the campus in November. In
addition, police had Mr. Plutonium sign a document promising that
he would not return to the campus.

Even though Mr. Plutonium was apparently unaware that the
"Manley Hubbell" computer was located at the university, Dr.
Henston said it was possible that Mr. Plutonium could affect
the program just by using one of the university computer
labs. After being forced off the campus, Mr. Plutonium wrote
lengthy messages on the Usenet protesting his treatment by
the police, but evinced no understanding that "Manley Hubbell"
and its security was the reason he was ejected.

"After that whole thing happened, [Mr. Plutonium] wrote posts
that went on and on about how there was this conspiracy
against him and his crazy physics theories about how the
universe is a plutonium atom," Mr. Parry, the Boston humorist,
said.

"We had to play along with the whole thing, act like we didn't
know what was really going on, which was that they didn't want
to let any Usenet bozos anywhere near 'Manley Hubbell'."

Mr. Plutonium could not be reached for comment.

--
Joe Manfre, Hyattsville, Maryland. The above is fictional.
Orange Cones of Washington D.C. http://dccones.manfre-land.com
"[E]ven though Joe Manfre appears to be a complete lunatic, he
might be right." -- Beable van Polasm

Glenn Knickerbocker

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Jun 7, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/7/00
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OK, IHBT. HAND.

Old shoes! Up again!

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Jun 7, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/7/00
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[Glenn Knickerbocker, alt.religion.kibology, Wed, 07 Jun 2000
22:45:27 GMT]

>OK, IHBT. HAND.
>
Close enough to fool me, but I'm pretty sure he was/is posting
from Oregon. He doesn't post daily anymore, on my server at
least, but the last few have lived up to expectations. He posts
with a munged email nowadays, so stalk:

Manley....@f24.n105.z1.fidonet.org.nospam

I liked this bit from
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/[ST_rn=ap]/getdoc.xp?AN=626764205

[Quote]
I went so far as to say not only was my Major = MATH but that
I also listed math as a minor. Perhaps that was to much &
chocked the system..yack, yack ,yackity yack.
:::::::::::::::::; oh one last thingie while on the subject..
So not being allowed two, i took to, listening to ducks, for
my instructions, YOU know, Quack Quack QUACK quack..
clearly any duck can count to four easily, but have you ever
noticed that five six & seven eight are couplets? hmm?
?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
oh well back to beyound Maxwell, the way i do it?/?
[end]

Today's episode is completely coherent (this is not a troll).

http://www.deja.com/=dnc/[ST_rn=ap]/getdoc.xp?AN=632255805


--
Peter Willard http://www.drizzle.com/~petew
``The fact that inhumanity is coupled with so much stupidity
makes one feel almost optimistic in a dangerous way.'' -Erich
Hecke

Brad Acker

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Jun 7, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/7/00
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On Thu, 08 Jun 2000 00:15:14 GMT, Simon Clark 2000 <cla...@my-deja.com>
wrote:
>In article <8F4CA949C...@209.30.0.14>,
> man...@flash.net (Joe Manfre) wrote:
>
>: This article was published in The New York Times on Wednesday,

>: June 7, 2000, page C1.
>
>[snip]
>
>: "Manley Hubbell" posted its messages on Usenet, a system of

>: Internet chat rooms created and maintained by New York-based
>: Deja.com Inc., whose stock price plummeted 9.3 percent on the
>: Nasdaq Stock Market after traders learned of the possibility of
>: the shutdown.
>
>HA! You ALMOST trolled me, but you made one fatal mistake: everyone knows
>the Usenet chatrooms are owned by RemarQ! Everything else was perfectly
>plausible, but you had to get greedy. Tut tut...

I heard Bob Hope was gonna buy USENET, and rename it "Bob Hope's
USENET."

--
____ ____ ____ ____ ____
||A |||C |||K |||E |||R || Brad Acker
||__|||__|||__|||__|||__|| brad...@usa.com
|/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\| "Make it happen!"

Simon Clark 2000

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Jun 8, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/8/00
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In article <8F4CA949C...@209.30.0.14>,
man...@flash.net (Joe Manfre) wrote:

: This article was published in The New York Times on Wednesday,


: June 7, 2000, page C1.

[snip]

: "Manley Hubbell" posted its messages on Usenet, a system of


: Internet chat rooms created and maintained by New York-based
: Deja.com Inc., whose stock price plummeted 9.3 percent on the
: Nasdaq Stock Market after traders learned of the possibility of
: the shutdown.

HA! You ALMOST trolled me, but you made one fatal mistake: everyone knows


the Usenet chatrooms are owned by RemarQ! Everything else was perfectly
plausible, but you had to get greedy. Tut tut...

--
Simon Clark 2000 - Urban Crime-Fighter
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/clarksj/

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

Poot Rootbeer

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Jun 8, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/8/00
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pe...@drizzle.com (Old shoes! Up again!) wrote:

>Close enough to fool me, but I'm pretty sure he was/is posting
>from Oregon. He doesn't post daily anymore, on my server at
>least, but the last few have lived up to expectations.

Did he ever complete his Voyage to Gravolti? I was thinking about
vacationing there this summer and want to know what the weather is
like.

Old shoes! Up again!

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Jun 8, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/8/00
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[Poot Rootbeer, alt.religion.kibology, Thu, 08 Jun 2000
01:45:09 GMT]

He just sort of hung it up in December, it was not clear if he
made it to "magnetotoroidal space" or what that meant. V2G gave
Fridays a terrific weirdness for a while. Now there's nothing to
look forward to except getting the refills at the Taco Bell and
the Pepto-Bismo in the Buick, five minutes after sundown. He
still mentions "gravolti", the unit of gravitational
potential???????? I just know he has a pile of ultra-bizarre
notebooks that need to be bound into the Final Book.

From http://www.deja.com/=dnc/[ST_rn=ps]/getdoc.xp?AN=630971073

"AN electron VOLT of Energy (e-6 erg)
& a !surge of power. yes, yes and 1/100 Sec of
Time
I've been wrong B4 very VERY very . So maybe its not Sunday,
where U is. Hope your pop, aint lost it's fizz. "

Joe Manfre

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Jun 8, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/8/00
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pe...@drizzle.com (Old shoes! Up again!) wrote in
<8F4C9D2D4b...@207.211.168.82>:

>[Glenn Knickerbocker, alt.religion.kibology, Wed, 07 Jun 2000
>22:45:27 GMT]
>
>>OK, IHBT. HAND.
>>

>Close enough to fool me, but I'm pretty sure he was/is posting
>from Oregon.


Naive!! The guy who programmed the "Manley Hubbell"
program didn't want it to reveal its actual location!

Actually, my main regret is that I set that story in
Cleveland and forgot to mention Carol Paliwoda! But
I had to put it in Cleveland in order to tie it in
with Archie Pu getting kicked off the CWRU campus
there.

Speaking of Cleveland, today I was in downtown D.C.
having some tasty Wendy's food when I noticed that my
drink cup said, "We're Open Late!" Now, that
particular Wendy's location closes at 9 p.m., except
on Sundays, when it closes at 8 -- I don't think that
qualifies as "late."

The cup depicted Wendy's founder R. David Thomas
wearing a nightcap and leaning out of a drive-through
window (which at Wendy's is called a "Pick-Up Window").
Drive-through windows are indeed the parts of Wendy's
locations that are open fairly late, but that Wendy's
lacks a drive-through, since it is located in a
storefront on the street level of a big K Street office
building in the central business district of the city.

Anyway, I wished I'd brought a camera with me, since
that Wendy's also had a cute little orange cone standing
on the floor between the entrances to the two restrooms.
Hanging over the cone was one of those framed posters
of a painting, where the painting takes up just a portion
of the poster, and the rest contains the name of the
artist and the painting and the museum where the painting
is located, which in this case was the Cleveland Museum
of Art.


JM

--
Joe Manfre, Hyattsville, Maryland.

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