A couple of McCain supporters and GOP hacks can’t quite believe that Barack Obama can think his own thoughts and put them together in complete sentences. So they tried to launch an investigation using the expertise of an Oxford philosopher to "prove" that Obama’s autobiography, The Dreams from My Father was actually ghost written by the dreaded terrorist he "pals" around with – William Ayers! (via Leiter Reports)
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Accidental Blogger 
3 responses to “A November Surprise That Wasn’t!”
The only proof demonstrated by this affair is of the perdurable stupidity of Cashill, Cannon, and Fox. They are completely ignorant of stylistics, let alone “stylometrics” and simple statistics. Long ago, I took a seminar as a graduate student with an eminent philologist, the late, great Vinton Dearing, one of the early advocates of the use of computing technologies to assist research in the humanities. He was then editor of UC’s edition of the works of John Donne. My classmate and I spent part of the term crafting programs in BASIC to assist with parsing Donne’s texts and producing hypothetical ways to describe them numerically. We had a lot of fun speculating about what the data might reveal about Donne as compared to his contemporaries, or about early versus late Donne. Needless to say, we were under no illusion that we were somehow precisely describing Donne’s style. Plainly, the technology and our understanding of its capabilities have advanced, and plainly, we have Prof. Millican to use it with authority.
Talk about forced analogy! As Millican writes in his account of the ridiculous charade, “this sort of analysis can do virtually nothing to support Cashill’s theory.” What imbeciles!
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Ruchira:
Demagoguery just ain’t what it used to be, is it? And yet I find myself afraid to laugh. As you’ve said, I’ll uncross my fingers after tomorrow.
Dean:
You’ve expanded my vocabulary with “perdurable.” What a fantastic word.
As for “crafting programs in BASIC”…now there’s a blast from the past! I think that the last time I crafted a program in BASIC was on my family’s Texas Instruments (my father didn’t want to dish out for an Atari, for some reason), in 1983, when I was seven years old. The program in question would have looked something like this:
10 CLS
20 PRINT “SARA [my sister’s name] IS STUPID”
30 GOTO 20
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Anna, when you mention Texas Instruments, I think of one of the first calculators–not computers–made available to the ordinary consumer. It competed with an HP, which required one to learn the supremely dubbed Reverse Polish Notation for entering problems. This would have been around 1975 or so, before your were a twinkle, etc. Being lazy, I bought the TI. By 1976, I was in high school pre-calculus with an amazing teacher who insisted we explore programming on a computer with the giggle-inducing name, Wang. C’mon. We were nerdy high school guys and gals. Storage was to audiocassette, no hard drive whatsoever. That’s where I acquired the basics of BASIC. (Shouldn’t you have “commented” the bracketed portion, thus: “15 REM My sister’s name is Sara.”?)
How far we’ve come from those days of clearing the screen before libeling our siblings! Just yesterday, a buddy of mine pointed me to a post on craigslist–currently “flagged for removal”–by a woman seeking a man. It was several lines of SQL with variables for “characteristic” (and values like “witty,” “well groomed,” and so forth) and a threshold constraint: “<> obese”. Clever.
By the way, for the sake of perfect historical accuracy, Vinton Dearing was editor not of John Donne, but John Dryden. Big difference.
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