Cap'n Refsmmat

See The Science of Good and Evil,, by Michael Shermer.

Tricky. I'd need to have sentences starting with "like" or "similar to" in my source text so that it would have something to go on. Now, I could use my list of words and their part of speech to pair together random nouns and adjectives. However, getting a line constructed in that way to fit in with the rest of the poem would be difficult. I also have a thesaurus file I could use to match similar words together. If I have words with similar meanings on nearby lines, would that make the poem sound more cohesive?

Here's how the databases work at the moment: I have different source texts. I generate Markov chains for each source text and store them separately. Then, when creating a poem, I specific which source each line of the poem should use. I can do three lines from one source, then two from another. So I can already do mixing without mixing the back-ends. On the other hand, I could use the evolutionary idea for a different purpose, namely choosing the right settings. I'm going to add the ability to match syllables and basic meter to the poem generator, so for a given poem I'll have quite a few parameters: Syllables per line Meter "Brain" to use on each line Rhyme scheme And so on. I could evolve my way to the funniest concoction. Here's a question, though: how can I make my poems have a "theme"? That is, at the moment there's nothing to cause one line to be related to the next except by rhyme. They can discuss completely different things. How, if it's possible, can I make lines related?

That concept of Satan comes after Job was written. But very well, the existence of Satan is a good question, and one that perhaps should have its own thread instead of being distracting here.

Why can't an omni-everything God allow millions of others to be good and Job to not suffer? God himself says Job is "blameless." Check the links I gave. Read the rest of the book to see Job suffering disproportionately -- he's blameless, yet he suffers enough to curse the day he was born. (But not God, mind you.) All good questions, although the Satan of the Old Testament is "the accuser," more of a prosecutor-like figure than Mr. Evil.

Yes, but we're talking about the problem of evil, which is the four premises I describe in my first post. The third and fourth are straight from Job, so they're hardly disputable unless you want to get into Biblical interpretation. Now, the first premise makes sense because of the definition of omnibenevolence. Or do you disagree with it? Or the second premise, which defines God? Which? Both? Why? Answering the main question of this thread by saying "I don't want to answer" isn't really helpful.

If you accept the premises in my first post, yes. Which premise(s) do you disagree with?

The point is that an omnibenevolent being, by definition, should choose to stop evil. It's part of being benevolent. If I'm a benevolent leader, I act to prevent harm to those who I lead. However, nothing in the definition of omnibenevolent, omnipotent or omniscient implies balance. Now, it's perfectly true that if we lived in a world with no evil, we might ask different questions. But they wouldn't be "if God is omnibenevolent, why doesn't he allow evil?" We'd probably have a different conception of God, and we'd ask different questions. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Well, if there isn't one, we certainly don't have the problem of evil anymore, do we?

Why does this balance have to exist? And why are liquid and plasma balances? Or solid and gas? Basically, what prevents an omnipotent being from removing the evil? Is the omnipotent being bound by the rules of balance? Because that's not very omnipotent to me.

I have that, plus Adobe, plus Apple, plus a few acceptable use policies. I need more text to be interesting. If you have any reallllly long legal texts you think might work, point me to them. (United States Code, in text file format? If you can find it, I'll use it.) Okay, turns out I now have an IPA pronunciation dictionary that includes stressed syllable markings. Parsing will be tricky -- it shows the stress marks before individual phonemes, not syllables -- but I might be able to use this to create meter. But first I'll do syllable counts so I can do haiku.

For good poetry, my input text needs to be 50,000 words or more. Otherwise, each word only has one rhyme or two in the source text, and so I end up just repeating chunks of the source text and using the same word to rhyme multiple times. I could crawl some website of amateur poetry and use that for text, though. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedAlso, does anyone know how I could make poetry with meter and rhythm? I'd need a way of telling between stressed and unstressed syllables. I have a database of IPA pronunciations of words, which may help.

I wonder what "neutral" even does on a Prius's continuously variable transmission.

So, for fun, I put together a program to make computer-generated poetry. It uses a rhyming dictionary and Markov chains to throw together words in a way that works. Brief summary of how it works: I take some source text (the Bible, the novels of Mark Twain, whatever) and have the program go through and observe what word often comes after what three words. So if there's "the quick brown fox," the program will observe that "fox" can come after "the quick brown." It also does this in reverse, which will come in handy later. For the lines that don't have to rhyme, I just pick a random three words and choose any random word that can come after them, and work my way down the line. For lines that do, I find the word I have to rhyme with, look it up in the rhyming dictionary, and find a rhyme in my Markov chains. Then I work backwards through the line, making a line that makes sense and has a rhyming word on the end. Here's a few samples: (I can change the "personality" in the middle of the poem, switching from the Bible to, well, other things...) (using legalese and a few other things) (Using Ulysses) So, here's my question to SFN: How can I improve this monster? My rhyming dictionary knows how many syllables each word has, so I can conceivably make poems that are restricted to certain numbers of syllables in each line. I can also attempt to make rhyming words have certain numbers of syllables, and so on. I can input my own rhyme schemes and have the program switch between "personalities" for different lines. What processing and cleverness would make this beast better? Think of what makes good poetry, then think of how a computer might do it... Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedAlso, what source texts would you recommend for good poetry? I have Ulysses, the Kamasutra, the Bible, some Mark Twain, some erotica, some Kafka, some legal documents, the Unabomber manifesto, and one or two others.

I can't see anything clearly more than a foot away without my glasses on, so that's not too bad. Sounds like you just need an eye test and new glasses. Eyes tend to change over time. Yeah, definitely get a checkup. If it's high blood pressure, for example, a doctor would be able to recommend changes that can get your blood pressure down, or prescribe medication. But you won't know unless you get checked out.

A structured debate format would make things even better, I think. Limit a thread to, say, five responses per side, with an introductory post by each and a concluding post by each. This would force the debaters to think through their arguments and make their case cohesively. You can look through the old forum I linked to and see this in action. However, this anonymous debate idea sounds interesting.

Hmm, that could be interesting. And once the debate is over, the challengers are revealed? That could be fun. But I'm not sure how many people would take the initiative to set it up. Would debaters in a thread prefer a one-on-one debate if it could be formal and anonymous?

Only if its rate of change is constant.

Ooh, I like it much better with our font. Question is, how does all that glow look when it's shrunk down to size to fit our page header? Also, there'd have to be a glow-free version for shirts and things. I'm curious what that would look like.

In the six other threads in this forum so far, none discuss the topic of whether God exists. The question of faith hasn't yet entered into it. I understand your position. But I still believe it is possible to have good discussions about religion in this forum, and I'm going to do everything I can to let that happen. If you're not interested in participating, or don't believe it can work, you're free to ignore this part of the forum.

Guess you arrived a little too late: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=84 (The forum's archived now, so it's only accessible by direct link.) I love the idea, but the last attempt died when nobody was willing to start debates. However, we could certainly encourage members engaged in long, drawn-out threads to get their arguments together and start a duel. Take a look through the old debate forum and its rules and let me know if you have any suggestions to make it better. If there's enough interest I wouldn't object to reopening it, although it might just run out of steam like the last one. Also, please ignore the 2004 version of me being an idiot.

Alternately, product: a thing produced by labor: products of farm and factory; the product of his thought. (From Zolar V's link.) Not a company.

There'll be a vote among the membership at some point.

Here's what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say on "extremist": One who is disposed to go to the extreme, or who holds extreme opinions; a member of a party advocating extreme measures. Also attrib. or as adj. Hence extremism, the views or actions of extremists; extremistic a., of or pertaining to extremists or extremism. Not a very specific definition.

Can't you simply argue that a fertilized egg is a nonzero number of persons? Why is specificity required?

They need not only 100 posts but 3 weeks of membership and 10 reputation points. Everyone starts off with ten points, and negative points can't be issued by members, but the staff could ding someone with negative points and they'd have to earn their rights to P&R slowly, gaining a few rep points at a time. Also: perhaps you guys should open a new thread on the secularity of science instead of taking this one off-topic.