Posts Tagged found haiku
Unintentional Haiku in my YouTube Video Descriptions
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector on May 10, 2020
Since I wrote a little app to download much of my YouTube metadata, it was obvious that I needed to feed it through another little app I wrote: Haiku Detector. So I did. In all of my public YouTube descriptions put together, with URLs removed, there are 26 172 sentences, and 436 detected haiku.
As is usually the case, a few of these ‘haiku’ were not really haiku because the Mac speech synthesis pronounces them wrong, and thus Haiku Detector counts their syllables incorrectly. A few more involved sentences which no longer made sense because their URLs had been removed, or which were partial sentences from song lyrics which looked like full sentences because they were on lines of their own. Most of the rest just weren’t very interesting.
There were quite a lot of song lyrics which fit into haiku, which suggest tunes to which other haiku can be sung, if the stress patterns match up. I’m not going to put those here though; there are too many, and I could make a separate post about haiku in Jonathan Coulton lyrics, having already compiled a JoCorpus for rhyme.science to find rhymes in. So here are some other categories of haiku I liked. For lack of a better idea, I’ll link the first word of each one to the video it’s from.
Apologies about my camerawork
Also, there’s a lot
of background noise so the sound
isn’t very good.
There was a little
too much light and sound for my
poor little camera. 🙂
But hey, if I’d brought
my external microphone,
it would have got wet.
I’m so sad that I
had to change batteries or
something part-way through. 😦
Who do I look like,
Joe Covenant in Glasgow
in 2008?
Now the guitar is
out of tune and my camera
is out of focus.
Performers being their typical selves
John Roderick:
Eventually
they get around to singing
the song Cinnamon.
Aimee Mann asks John
Roderick to play one of
his songs (which he wrote.)
Jim Boggia:
But first, he gives us
a taste of what he’s really
famous for: tuning.
And now he’s lost his
voice, so it’s going to be
great for everything.
Cody Wymore:
Cody Wymore can’t
do a set without Stephen
Sondheim in it.
Cody horns in on
it anyway by adding
a piano part.
He pauses time for
a bit so nobody knows
he was unprepared.
It’s about being
in a room full of people
and feeling alone.
Paul and Storm:
Why does every new
verse of their song keep taking
them so goddamn long?
Little did I know
that four other people would
throw panties at Paul.
Ted Leo:
We’re gonna bring the
mood down a little bit, but
maybe lift it up!
Nerf Herder:
Meanwhile, they have to
fix up the drums because I
guess they rocked too hard.
Zoe and Brian Gray:
It’s For the Glory
of Gleeble Glorp, which isn’t
a euphemism.
Zoe Gray has to
follow Brian Gray’s songs from
the Gleebleverse.
Clint McElroy:
He’s here to perform
for us an amazing act
of léger de main.
Travis McElroy:
Travis gets up on
stage and holds a small doll’s head
in a creepy way.
which brings us to Jonathan Coulton:
He loves us and is
very glad to be with us.
This is Creepy Doll.
Jonathan Coulton
remarks on the lax rhyming
in God Save The Queen.
Jonathan will use
Jim’s capo, and he will give
it back afterwards.
Jonathan did not
know this was going to be
a cardio set.
That guy Paul has been
seeing every goddamned day
for the last two months.
MC Frontalot:
MC Frontalot
talks about samples and tells
us what hiphop is.
Jean Grae:
It’s not because she’s
a lady, but because she’s
an alcoholic.
She feels like she should
get a guitar case, even
without a guitar.
Jon Spurney:
Jon Spurney rocks out
on the guitar solo, as
he is wont to do.
Me:
Eventually,
at about 6:38,
we get to the point.
The ship’s IT guy:
He has been very
glad to meet us, but he’s not
sad to see us leave.
Red Team Leader:
Red Leader has some
announcements to make before
the final concert.
The Red Team didn’t
mind, because we’re the team that
entertains ourselves.
All the JoCo Cruise performers in the second half of the last show:
Let’s bring Aimee Mann
back out to the stage to join
the Shitty Bar Band.
We now get into
the unrehearsed supergroup
section of the show.
JoCo Cruise hijinks
This is the last show,
unless we’re quarantined on
the ship for a while!
Half of those palettes
were 55-gallon drums
of caveat sauce.
This pun somehow leads
to a sad Happy Birthday
for Paul Sabourin.
Paul Sabourin points
out Kendra’s Glow Cloud dress in
the front row (all hail!)
They talk about why
they did note-for-note covers
instead of new takes.
Make It With You by
Bread, which has even better
string writing than Swift.
So by Friday night,
they’d written this musical
about JoCo Cruise.
A plan to take over the world:
Here’s how it’s going
to work: first we’re going to
have a nice dinner.
And once we have our
very own cruise ship, we shall
dominate the seas.
Some Truth:
An actual cake
which is not a lie. It was
delicious and moist.
It was delicious
and moist. This is Drew’s body
given up for us.
Questions and answers:
What do you do when
you reach the limits of your
own understanding?
When she reaches the
limits of her knowledge, she
says she doesn’t know.
the green people with
buttons who are aliens
wanting to probe you
Wash your hands! Do you
need to take your life jackets
to the safety drill?
What about water,
though? Where do you sign up for
the specialty lunch?
Calls to action
All this and more can
be real if you book yourself
a berth on that boat.
It was supported
by her Patreon patrons.
You could be one too!
If you want to hear
him sing more covers this way,
back this Kickstarter:
That will do for now. Next perhaps I’ll make word clouds of my YouTube descriptions from various time periods, to show what I was uploading at the time. Or perhaps I’ll feed the descriptions into the app I wrote to create the data for rhyme.science, see what the most common rhymes are, and write a poem about them, as I did with Last Chance to See.
Eventually, some of the content I create from my YouTube metadata will make it into a YouTube video of its own — perhaps finally a real channel trailer. But what will I write in the description and title, and will I have to calculate the steady state of a Markov chain to make sure it doesn’t affect the data it shows?
Unintentional Haiku in the Mueller Report
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector on April 20, 2019
Everyone’s talking about this Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, so I dusted off Haiku Detector and looked for interesting haiku in it. A friend pointed me to a text version, though it’s not ideal for finding haiku; it has many superfluous hard line breaks, missing or superfluous spaces, and so on, which make it harder for Haiku Detector to tell where words and sentences end. There were also page and footnote numbers included in the text. Eventually perhaps I’ll read through it and clean those things up. Haiku Detector found 105 ‘haiku’ in 18752 ‘sentences’.
There were, of course, several similar to this:
Harm to Ongoing
Matter 26 Harm to
Ongoing Matter
of which I think this is my favourite:
Harm to Ongoing
Matter – H a r m to
Ongoing Matter
Some headings formed haiku:
P . 6(e) 7.
Interactions and Contacts
with the Trump Campaign
Other Potential
Campaign Interest in Russian
Hacked Materials
Others which seemed to make sense and stop at actual sentence or at least clause boundaries were:
They are talking to
us. -It is a lot of risk. –
Office of Putin.
“If you have any
questions, I will be happy
to help contact him.”
“We understand all
of the sensitivities and
are not in a rush.”
We also sought a
voluntary interview
with the President.
It’s all because you
recused. AG is supposed to
be most important
He’s a showboater.
He’s a grandstander. I don’t
know any Russians.
you know, this Russia
thing with Trump and Russia is
a made-up story.
But I feel so-I
tell you, I feel a little
badly about it.
“I don’t want to talk
about that. No, I don’t want
to talk about that.”
The president has
issued no pardons in this
investigation.
President said, “I
don’t talk about that now. I
don’t talk about that.”
“Manafort really
appreciates the support
of President Trump.”
“Paul Manafort’s a
good man” and “it’s a very
sad thing that happened.”
The Supreme Court has
applied that clear-statement rule
in several cases.
No statutory
term could easily bear that
specialized meaning.
I understand these
documents already have
been produced to you.
Some were just amusingly surreal because of artefacts in the text:
113
Corney recalled he did not
114
This is the worst thing
that ever happened to me.
“508
815
The President responded,
“I never said that.”
If you imagine that’s the real end of the sentence, and slang for ‘get out!’, it sort of makes sense:
Not telling you to
do anything. Dershowitz
says POTUS can get
I haven’t read the report, nor am I likely to know enough about the surrounding events and characters to fully understand it (nor would I be able to do much about it if I did, not having the right to vote anywhere), but maybe these pseudorandom pseudopoetic snippets will bring some comic relief for those who have. Perhaps I’ll run it through NastyWriter next.
Unintentional Haiku in New Scientist’s Medical Frontiers: The Movie
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector on July 19, 2015
I’ve made a new version of Haiku Detector. The main changes are:
- Performance improvements
- Tweaks to which haiku are identified when punctuation is pronounced differently depending on line breaks and other factors (this includes a workaround for the ‘all numbers pronounced as zero’ bug I found in the speech synthesiser.) In my test data the list of haiku identified is better now.
- Bug fixes.
To celebrate the new release, I fed in the text from the latest New Scientist ‘Collection’ issue, on medical frontiers. The funniest haiku arose when the last sentence of one article joined up with the headline and byline of the next. For example, this looks like the tagline of a movie about an underappreciated superhero, fighting to save anti-vaxxers from diseases of yore:
They will not thank you.
Dan Jones FIGHTING INFECTION
Small shot, big impact
After the opening credits, we see our hero Dan Jones in his lab, and the subtitle announcing his first challenge.
DRUG: Chlorotoxin
SOURCE: Deathstalker scorpion
CONDITION: Cancer
His superpowers come, of course, from vaccines:
Some vaccines seem to
provide us with a host of
extra benefits
But not everybody is happy with that:
Several groups have been
trying to develop drugs
that block these signals.
These groups spread propaganda:
Half an hour or
so later, you’ll feel a lot
better. Or will you?
They work around rules:
“Because we use cells,
not field-grown plants, we don’t come
under the same rules.”
And they target humanity by zapping the very microorganisms they’re made up of. Here’s a quote from the evil mastermind:
There are more cells in
your body than there are stars
in the galaxy.
These cells can then be
killed using a laser that
penetrates the skin.
And just when Dan thought he had the solution, the problems compounded to the point of suspension of disbelief, precipitating a crisis. The mastermind had cooked up her own microbial minions:
Those microbes can be
in the environment or
a vaccine syringe.
To make matters worse,
there is a shortage of new
antibiotics.
The sequel, which may or may not be a Doctor Who crossover, features a heroine who will live forever:
“Just endless.” Helen
Thomson REGENERATION
Let’s get physical
Yep, it’s definitely a Doctor Who crossover. Here’s a quote from that movie:
“I’m the doctor. I’m
going to tell you what your
feelings really mean.”
She discovered that time, and specifically time travel, is the best cure for a broken heart:
If we can’t fix hearts
with stem cells there might be an
even better way
As the animal
was slowly warmed, it began
to return to life.
But however clever the TARDIS is, there’s one thing Helen Thomson isn’t sure she can do:
But can we ever
turn the clock back to a world
without HIV?
It turned out, weirdly enough, that the answer was in making sure there was enough shelf space for one’s awards. So she went home to Britain to save the Officers of the British Empire:
On her return home,
she applied those lessons in
British hospitals.
So far, two patients
have had OBEs, but neither in
a room with a shelf…
While we’re making sequels, let’s revive an old favourite, which never had any sequels:
The matrix holds a
dazzling array of future
possibilities.
But what is the matrix?
Normally, matrix
is harvested from human
or pig cadavers.
I guess you have to see it for yourself.
Another Haiku Detector Update, and Some Observations on Mac Speech Synthesis
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector on May 18, 2015
I subjected Haiku Detector to some serious stress-testing with a 29MB text file (that’s 671481 sentences, containing 16810 haiku, of which some are intentional) a few days ago, and kept finding more things that needed fixing or could do with improvement. A few days in a nerdsniped daze later, I have a new version, and some interesting tidbits about the way Mac speech synthesis pronounces things. Here’s some of what I did:
- Tweaked the user interface a bit, partly to improve responsiveness after 10000 or so haiku have been found.
- Made the list of haiku stay scrolled to the bottom so you can see the new ones as they’re found.
- Added a progress bar instead of the spinner that was there before.
- Fixed a memory issue.
- Changed a setting so it should work in Mac OS X 10.6, as I said here it would, but I didn’t have a 10.6 system to test it on, and it turns out it does not run on one. I think 10.7 (Lion) is the lowest version it will run on.
- Added some example text on startup so that it’s easier to know what to do.
- Made it a Developer ID signed application, because now that I have a bit more time to do Mac development (since I don’t have a day job; would you like to hire me?), it was worth signing up to the paid Mac Developer Program again. Once I get an icon for Haiku Detector, I’ll put it on the app store.
- Fixed a few bugs and made a few other changes relating to how syllables are counted, which lines certain punctuation goes on, and which things are counted as haiku.
That last item is more difficult than you’d think, because the Mac speech synthesis engine (which I use to count syllables for Haiku Detector) is very clever, and pronounces words differently depending on context and punctuation. Going through words until the right number of syllables for a given line of the haiku are reached can produce different results depending on which punctuation you keep, and a sentence or group of sentences which is pronounced with 17 syllables as a whole might not have words in it which add up to 17 syllables, or it might, but only if you keep a given punctuation mark at the start of one line or the end of the previous. There are therefore many cases where the speech synthesis says the syllable count of each line is wrong but the sum of the words is correct, or vice versa, and I had to make some decisions on which of those to keep. I’ve made better decisions in this version than the last one, but I may well change things in the next version if it gives better results.
Here are some interesting examples of words which are pronounced differently depending on punctuation or context:
| ooohh | Pronounced with one syllable, as you would expect |
| ooohh. | Pronounced with one syllable, as you would expect |
| ooohh.. | Spelled out (Oh oh oh aitch aitch) |
| ooohh… | Pronounced with one syllable, as you would expect |
| H H | Pronounced aitch aitch |
| H H H | Pronounced aitch aitch aitch |
| H H H H H H H H | Pronounced aitch aitch aitch |
| Da-da-de-de-da | Pronounced with five syllables, roughly as you would expect |
| Da-da-de-de-da- | Pronounced dee-ay-dash-di-dash-di-dash-di-dash-di-dash. The dashes are pronounced for anything with hyphens in it that also ends in a hyphen, despite the fact that when splitting Da-da-de-de-da-de-da-de-da-de-da-de-da-da-de-da-da into a haiku, it’s correct punctuation to leave the hyphen at the end of the line:
Da-da-de-de-da- Though in a different context, where – is a minus sign, and meant to be pronounced, it might need to go at the start of the next line. Greater-than and less-than signs have the same ambiguity, as they are not pronounced when they surround a single word as in an html tag, but are if they are unmatched or surround multiple words separated by spaces. Incidentally, surrounding da-da in angle brackets causes the dash to be pronounced where it otherwise wouldn’t be. |
| U.S or u.s | Pronounced you dot es (this way, domain names such as angelastic.com are pronounced correctly.) |
| U.S. or u.s. | Pronounced you es |
| US | Pronounced you es, unless in a capitalised sentence such as ‘TAKE US AWAY’, where it’s pronounced ‘us’ |
I also discovered what I’m pretty sure is a bug, and I’ve reported it to Apple. If two carriage returns (not newlines) are followed by any integer, then a dot, then a space, the number is pronounced ‘zero’ no matter what it is. You can try it with this file; download the file, open it in TextEdit, select the entire text of the file, then go to the Edit menu, Speech submenu, and choose ‘Start Speaking’. Quite a few haiku were missed or spuriously found due to that bug, but I happened to find it when trimming out harmless whitespace.
Apart from that bug, it’s all very clever. Note how even without the correct punctuation, it pronounces the ‘dr’s and ‘st’s in this sentence correctly:
the dr who lives on rodeo dr who is better than the dr I met on the st john’s st turnpike
However, it pronounces the second ‘st’ as ‘saint’ in the following:
the dr who lives on rodeo dr who is better than the dr I met in the st john’s st john
This is not just because it knows there is a saint called John; strangely enough, it also gets this one wrong:
the dr who lives on rodeo dr who is better than the dr I met in the st john’s st park
I could play with this all day, or all night, and indeed I have for the last couple of days, but now it’s your turn. Download the new Haiku Detector and paste your favourite novels, theses, holy texts or discussion threads into it.
If you don’t have a Mac, you’ll have to make do with a few more haiku from the New Scientist special issue on the brain which I mentioned in the last post:
Being a baby
is like paying attention
with most of our brain.
But that doesn’t mean
there isn’t a sex difference
in the brain,” he says.
They may even be
a different kind of cell that
just looks similar.
It is easy to
see how the mind and the brain
became equated.
We like to think of
ourselves as rational and
logical creatures.
It didn’t seem to
matter that the content of
these dreams was obtuse.
I’d like to thank the people of the xkcd Time discussion thread for writing so much in so many strange ways, and especially Sciscitor for exporting the entire thread as text. It was the test data set that kept on giving.
Haiku Detector Update
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector on May 11, 2015
I’ve been sitting on some improvements to Haiku Detector for a while, and it’s about time I released the new version. I had been planning to put this version on the app store, but I’m waiting to hear back from somebody about an icon for it. So for now, you can download it without going through the store. It should work on Mac OS X 10.6 or later.
This version finds haiku made up of multiple sentences rather than only those made of 17-syllable sentences. I also fixed the bug which caused it to crash occasionally when dealing with very long texts. To celebrate, I’ll go through some of the same texts I did when I first released Haiku Detector, and see what new haiku are discovered. To start with, John Scalzi‘s Old Man’s War. This version of Haiku Detector finds 304 haiku in it. Sometimes, sentences can be included in more than one haiku:
“I’m sorry. My sense
of humor was surgically
removed as a child.”
“My sense of humor
was surgically removed as
a child.” “Oh,” I said.
“Oh,” I said. “That was
a joke,” she said, and stood up,
extending her hand.
Here are some of my favourites of the multi-sentence haiku:
She asked, still without
actually looking up
at me. “Pardon me?”
“Okay,” I said. “Mind
if I ask you a question?”
“I’m married,” she said.
“Well, she doesn’t have
to live with you, now does she.”
“How was the cookie?”
“Our friend Thomas would
make it to mile six before
his heart imploded.”
This one sounds like it could be a metaphysical statement about what consciousness is in general:
Your consciousness is
perceiving the small time lag
between there and here.
“I would not presume
to assume, Master Sergeant!”
‘Presume to assume’?
My wife’s out here, sure.
But she’s happy to live her
new life without me.
“Let me see.” Silence.
The familiar voice again.
“Get this log off him.”
“The question now is
what is really going on.”
“Any thoughts on it?”
I think this one is my favourite:
I can just be me.
But I think you could love me
if you wanted to.
I found a lot of new haiku in the CMS paper announcing the discovery of the Higgs boson, but they were all combinations of names from the stupendous author list. Since I included some from New Scientist last time, here are some from the issue of New Scientist that I am currently reading, a special issue on the human brain:
Imaging techniques
are allowing us to see
the brain in action.
The sound waves broke up
the synchronous firing,
ending the seizure.
Thought experiments
Sometimes an experiment
is impossible.
The ancient Greeks knew
about thought experiments
in mathematics.
These two go together:
Does that mean we should
revise our definition
of intelligence?
Until recently,
the same one had been used since
the 1950s.
I have many ideas for improving Haiku Detector, and I’d still like to see if I can detect the best-sounding haiku using linguistic tagging, but before that I’m thinking of rewriting the whole thing in Swift as a learning exercise. Since I don’t have a day job at the moment, I have a bit of free time if I strategically ignore sections of my to-do list. Actually, on that note, here are some particularly obvious haiku from the Mac OS X and iOS Human Interface guidelines:
At a minimum,
a menu displays a list
of menu items.
A picker displays
a set of values from which
a user picks one.
That will do for now. I hope you enjoy playing with the new version of Haiku Detector.
Unintentional Haiku from New Scientist on A Better You
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector, Holidailies on December 27, 2014
It’s been a while since I’ve run an issue of New Scientist through Haiku Detector. Since I’m far behind on holidailies, here are some of the unintentional haiku in their collection issue, A Better You. There were 40 haiku all up, many of which were bylines or captions. Many others were rather underwhelming as haiku, but here are the at-least-passably-whelming ones. First, some about getting smart:
We kick off with the
most important organ in
your body: your brain.
These brain areas
are very active when you
play an instrument.
Then you have to have
the motivation to do
something about it.
Now some about what not to eat:
As a result, health
bodies are gearing up for
a “war on sugar”.
Its conclusion: there
is “no evidence” that food
can be addictive.
Is it simply that
too much sugar equals too
many calories?
Unfortunately,
recent research casts doubt on
their effectiveness.
Headlines have appeared
questioning the benefits
of eating less salt.
The last one on that topic echoes Hank Green’s thoughts on picking the right addiction:
Assuming you will
have some vices, the trick is
to choose them wisely.
Some about growing old gracefully:
Some think the effect
is simply about having
a long way to fall.
What you need is a
bit of excitement along
the way. Take some risks.
What on earth was he
doing differently? What was
cushioning the blow?
Not surprisingly,
one of the most important
is intelligence.
Learning like a child
is easy if you know how,
says David Robson
Whatever you want
to learn, it’s never too late
to charge those grey cells.
He recently took
up Chinese, and has no plans
to stop after that.
Some under the heading ‘Get physical’:
They just haven’t been
very good at telling us
what they’ve discovered.
Could exercise be
a killer lying in wait
for the unwary?
Pain may return on
finishing the exercise,
or the next morning.
So if exercise
is so beneficial, why
won’t people take it?
“I’m sorry,” he says
when I ask about the noise.
“I’m on a treadmill.”
and some recipes for success:
It seems that anger
can make us impetuous,
selfish and risk-prone.
Concentrating in
itself is not enough to
screen out distractions.
Instead of nuking
your friendly bacteria
you should nurture them.
Their wounds were slower
to heal, and they also caught
more throat infections.
One theory is that
CMV plays a key role
in immune ageing.
And good vagal tone
improves emotional and
social well-being.
In conclusion, a haiku from me:
I hope these will lead
if not to better haiku,
to a better you.
Haiku Detector Achieves its Purpose (and will now proceed to have an existential crisis)
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector on October 19, 2014
I originally wrote Haiku Detector because my friend Gry saw Times Haiku and wondered whether there were any haiku in her Ph. D. thesis. The other day I heard back about the haiku she found. It turns out that even the title of the thesis is a haiku:
Developments for
studies of the extremes of
nuclear matter
Here’s another one, which could be about anything. The last line is a bit of an anticlimax.
As of today, the
origin of this strength is
not well understood.
When I read this one, I wondered if miniball was a mini-golf style version of another ball game:
At HIE-ISOLDE
the MINIBALL would be used
for the same purpose.
The impurities
of 48,50Ti
are easily seen.
After seeing these, I sent her the as-yet-unreleased new version of Haiku Detector, which can detect haiku made up of several sentences. Having mostly had my name on papers authored by the entire CMS collaboration, I expected her to find a lot of haiku in the author list. But ISOLDE is much smaller, and also this is her thesis that she wrote, not some paper whose author list she got tacked onto. So she got some from references:
Kitatani, S.
Goko, H. Toyokawa,
K. Yamada, T.
C 47,
537
(1993).
and some things with section numbers tacked on:
2.1.1
Open shell nuclei and
collective models
This matrix is the
starting point for the Oslo
method. 45
That last one has so many possibilities. I like to think of it as being about an electronic band called The Oslo Method which released a 45rpm record about The Matrix. Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the haiku is. You have to see it for yourself. And indeed, you can see the other haiku she found on the #MyHaikuThesis tag on Twitter.
I noticed something interesting while writing this post — some of the ‘haiku’ Gry found include gamma (γ) symbols:
The γ-ray strength functions
display no strong enhancement
for low γ energies.
5.2.3
Particle energy-γ-ray
energy matrix
Haiku Detector on her Mac has treated them as having zero syllables, as if they are not pronounced, and I think I recall characters like that not being pronounced in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. But I just checked on my Mac running Mac OS X Yosemite, and the speech synthesis (which Haiku Detector relies on for syllable counting) pronounces γ as ‘Greek small letter gamma’, so Haiku Detector does not find those erroneous haiku. I think that this might be a new feature in Yosemite.
But here’s where it gets weird: you’d think that it’s just reading ‘Greek small letter gamma’ because that’s the unicode name of the character. I tried with a few emoji and other special characters, and that hypothesis is upheld. But the unicode character named ‘chicken’ (🐔) is pronounced ‘chicken head’. Spooky. Another strange thing is that there is no unicode ‘duck’ character.
If you’ve been paying attention, you probably know why I happened to come across those oddities. I’ll have to investigate them later, though; right now I’m in Edinburgh for NSScotland, and it’s about time I looked at some tourism information.
So, Haiku Detector; what now? Maybe look for supersymmetric haiku?
Update: It seems that in Mac OS X 10.8, γ is not pronounced, and 🐔 is pronounced ‘chicken emoji’. Other emoji also have ’emoji’ in their pronunciations, while still others are not pronounced. I wonder if pronunciations were added (and later edited to remove the ’emoji’) for certain emoji, and now the default pronunciation has changed from nothing to the unicode name. So ‘🐔’ ended up with the explicit pronunciation ‘chicken head’ while others which were not previously pronounced use their unicode names. So this should be a haiku in Yosemite, though for some reason Haiku Detector does not detect it:
🐒🐔
🐔🐒🐒
🍄🍄🐍
Unintentional Haiku Spoken in a Courtroom 241 Years Ago
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector on September 1, 2014
When I discovered that the court proceedings of the Old Bailey were available online, naturally I had to see whether they contained any haiku. The archive is too huge to put into Haiku Detector all at once, so I just checked the ‘on this day in…’ link whenever I had time. The most haiku-rich I’ve seen so far was from a wounding case on 8 September 1773, which, now that I think about it, should not have appeared as an ‘on this day…’ link yet. I had to clean up the text a little first, to remove all the Q.s and speakers’ names. Here are some of the 55 haiku that were left.
These ones sound like some kind of metaphor for the fiddly final steps towards achieving goals, and the monsters that might demotivate us from climbing toward those goals, but which are secretly part of ourselves:
How far is it from
the upper step of the stairs
to the door itself?
Upon the landing.
Was the door within view of
you at that time? Yes.
The General must
have seen you coming up two
or three steps at least?
How far had you got
up stairs before you saw Hyde?
Did you hear Hyde’s voice?
Who else was with you
there? I cannot remember
any one but me.
Where did you wait while
Hyde went into the house? At
the top of the street.
The world’s simplest riddle:
Yes. Where did you go
when you came into the house?
Into the entry.
And some more intriguing questions:
After Lee struck me:
the knife dropped upon the ground.
Was it by a blow?
Had he no blow with
the butt end of a pistol?
Not that I know of.
You say you knew the
General very well; do
you think he knew you?
When you came back what
part of the family did
you find below stairs?
In what condition
was the door when he fired
the second pistol?
What did he tell him?
That a parcel of fellows
were below with sticks.
Did you observe the
hole in the door case that was
made by the pistol?
Did you look through the
door to see the direction
the ball had taken?
Was the General
upon his legs or not? He
was upon his legs.
Some which sound like bloody massacres until you get to the last line:
I believe this is
the knife you was cutting the
bread and butter with.
Was James in the room
with you while you was cutting
the bread and butter?
Finally, a few which sound a bit dirty (or so I am told) if you have that kind of mind:
Unintentional Haiku in Time Cube
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector, NaPoWriMo on April 16, 2014
I’m not sure if I’ll keep up the daily poems for NaPoWriMo for the rest of the month, because I remembered that the deadline for a short story contest I plan to enter is also at the end of the month, so I’ll need time to write something for that. But today’s What If reminded me of the hilariously incoherent ‘Time Cube‘ website, and I wondered if there were any unintentional haiku in it. I ran Haiku Detector on it, and I found these ones on the first page:
I have so much to
teach you, but you ignore me
you evil asses.
Humans ignore their
4 corner stages of life
metamorphosis.
All 4/24
hour days occur within
1 Earth rotation.
I have created
simultaneous 4 day
rotation of Earth.
Your God claimed to have
created a single day
rotation of Earth.
Singularity
educated humans are
not intelligent.
I like the first one best. I hadn’t read this far before, but it turns out the second page has some weird statements supporting racial segregation on it, so if you’re likely to be bothered by ridiculous-sounding racist statements by a crackpot, read no further.
Unintentional Haiku… of Mars
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector on June 30, 2013
Kurukkan suggested using Haiku Detector to find the unintentional haiku in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ‘A Princess of Mars’. This it seemed like a fine idea to me. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve heard of it, and there was even another movie based on it (‘John Carter’) released recently. There are quite a few haiku which have a nice twist in the last line; one even has a rhyme. I’ve trimmed out some that really don’t work, but since they’re not much effort to read anyway, I’ve left in some that still sound picturesque even if they don’t break nicely into the lines. If you’re not into Mars fiction, there are some haiku about a real Mars mission, and an opportunity for you to send your own haiku to Mars, at the end.
On regaining the
plaza I had my third glimpse
of the captive girl.“Some day you shall know,
John Carter, if we live; but
I may not tell you.And now the signal
has been given to resume
the march, you must go.”“I am glad you came,”
she said; “Dejah Thoris sleeps
and I am lonely.I have twice wronged you
in my thoughts and again I
ask your forgiveness.Sola and I walked,
making Dejah Thoris ride,
much against her will.I have escaped from
worse plights than this,” and I tried
to smile as I lied. Read the rest of this entry »
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