Well, I’m off to Pennsylvania for the holiday weekend. I don’t know what kind of Internet access I’ll have, but I’ve already set the blog on autopilot for the next four days. The posts are written – all regular features: a Riddle, a Googleplex, an Anagram, and a Lipogram – and are scheduled to appear on their proper days, one per day from Thursday to Sunday. Sunday is also the last day of the month, which means that if everything goes as planned, I will have fulfilled my obligations to NaBloPoMo.
I’m glad I participated in the experiment, even though it was difficult at times. I think I’d like to continue trying to post on a regular basis. Thanks to all of you who have been reading along, and especially to those who have left comments behind. You can see the ten most recent comments in the right-hand sidebar if you want to join in the active conversations.
There will be a new riddle tomorrow. As always, the first person to answer correctly gets a name check in the main post. However, since I don’t know when I’ll actually get a chance to go online, it may be a few days before I’m able to respond. Thank you in advance for your patience.
From what I can tell, the site works from a table of which words follow other words in the play, and how often. It then constructs a chain by looking at the last word (or few words) that were entered, and choosing a random word of those that actually follow that word (or few words) in the play.
For example, one place in the play has “Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio.” Another part of the play has “I knew your father.” The Markov chain might generate “Alas! poor Yorick. I knew…” and then, only looking at the last two words “I knew” might follow up with “your father.” The final result would be “Alas! poor Yorick. I knew your father.”
This is a favorite example provided by the author, but there are a lot of funny possibilities. You can keep refreshing the page to get a new randomly-generated Hamlet.
Thanks, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead:
Ere I could accuse me of the courtier, cousin, and with a look so piteous in purport
As I perceived it, if I gall him slightly,
Whips out his rapier, cries, ‘A rat, a touch,
The queen desires you to remain
Here is your only jig-maker. What it should be old as I will be laid to us, till I know not–lost all my best obey you, and, at a shot
So art thou to me all the battlements their ordnance fire: proclaim no shame
When Roscius was an actor in Rome,–
As of a dear father murder’d,
With mirth in funeral and with a crafty madness, like the herald Mercury
New-lighted on a roar? Not one now o’er
The triumph of his own scandal.
Via Electoral-Vote.com (which I’m still reading for some reason), we find another really cool map. This is an animated GIF showing the electoral results by county for every presidential election from 1960 – 2004. It’s called Purple America, and it was created by from Robert Vanderbei from Princeton University.
You can watch counties change from blue to red and back again. You can see where Ross Perot and George Wallace had the most support. Or you can squint your eyes and watch the entire country change its shade like a mood ring. Enjoy!
I’m always curious to see what search terms bring people to this site. Here is a list of all of the search terms that brought people here yesterday:
how shakespeare demonstrated “religion” in his plays
presidents with the letter y in their name
king henry viii shakespeare for children
who are the present day descendants of ann boleyn
king henry the eighth for kids
modern day descendants of henry the eighth
free shakespeare for kids
shakespeare did math
math – coins – line drawings of
saddam hussein vs. iago
textual analysis of elizabath i letter to king james vi
what play of shakespeare hads the word shyster in it?
characterize ophelia in act 3 scene 1
open-ended question of the week
who am i riddles
music tech teacher.com’
shakespeare class distinction “as you like it”
sir francis bacon blog
The word “shyster” does not appear in Shakespeare. There is a character named Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and a popular anti-lawyer quote in Henry VI, Part Two.
Several United States presidents have had the letter Y in their names. First name: Ulysses S. Grant, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter; Last name: John Tyler, Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy; First and Last Name: Zachary Taylor; Commonly Used Middle Name: John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison.
The spam was getting way out of control, so I installed reCAPTCHA. Now, when you want to leave a comment on this blog, you will just need to type in a couple of words to prove you’re a real human. I apologize for any inconvenience.
Feel free to play around with it by leaving a comment in this post. This will also let me know that the thing is working, so thanks in advance.
Have you been looking for a game that combines the fun geography challenge of Traveler IQ with the social responsibility of FreeRice? Look no further. A site called FreePoverty allows you to identify locations on a label-free map while generating ad revenue that donates water to people around the world who need it. Enjoy!
I was doing pretty well at first, but my ignorance of Australian geography turned out to be quite a detriment on the higher levels. Crikey!
For their video project, the 8th grade class I was working with decided to create a modern-day talk show (instead of a reality show) with characters from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline as guests. The show includes scenes from the original play, an alternate ending, and a commercial for a Cymbeline video game… all written, performed, and produced by the students!
They presented their video at an in-school film festival, and represented their school at a citywide film festival hosted by my organization. And now, through the magic of the Internet, I share the video with you:
If you want to share this video with others, you can link directly to this post or embed the video from its TeacherTube page (where you can also watch the video if you have trouble loading it in here). We will also be featuring the video on the school’s home page.
UPDATE: The kids put the video on YouTube. It’s a much higher quality than what I was able to post to TeacherTube, so if you want to embed the video on your site, you should use that one.
Via The Shakespeare Geek, we learn of Madeline, who has made good progress on a project to record herself reading all of Shakespeare’s sonnets on YouTube.
These recordings stand out very favorably among the many who have put themselves speaking Shakespeare online. She doesn’t feel the need to over-emote, but instead trusts and enjoys the words of the poet. Shakespeare’s language seems to come very naturally to her, and the videos are a pleasure to watch. Also, I think because she’s so young, she brings a freshness and vitality to her readings, and makes the old poems feel relevant for a new generation.
