Sunday, April 05, 2009

Abulafia! & Foucault's Pendulum

I had been reading Eco Umberto's Foucault's Pendulum. Its a nice book and left me very inspired. Not so much by the plot, the linguistic manoeuvring or the humbling intellectual self index of his knowledge but by The Plan a product of a programmed Abulafia! Abulafia- a fantastic device capable of assimilating disparate texts from scriptures, pop culture, age of reason to insanity into strings of comprehensive and almost convincing conspiracy theories. Like Musikalisches Würfelspiel to create music!
Inspired by all this, I wordled (A "Wordle" enables you to see how frequently words appear in a given text, or see the relationship between a column of words and a column of numbers. You can tweak your word "clouds" with different fonts, layouts, and colour schemes) together some of the most influential speeches of the 20th century, which you may find here. The speeches are:
1) We shall Fight on the Beaches by Winston Churchill
This speech was delivered to House of Commons on June 4 1940

2) A Tryst with Destiny by Jawaharlal Nehru
This speech was delivered to the Constituent Assembly of India in New Delhi on August 14 1947

3) I have a dream by Martin Luther King
This speech was delivered on August 28 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington

4) Ask not what your country can do for you by John F Kennedy
This speech was delivered by John F Kennedy at his inauguration in Washington on January 20 1961

5) An ideal for which I am prepared to die for by Nelson Mandela
This statement was made from the dock at the opening of Mandela's trial on charges of sabotage, Supreme court of South Africa, Pretoria, April 20 1964.

On wordling all of the above speeches together one comes across a word cloud or more of a primordial soup for a very good speech.
Now all we require is a sentence maker to reveal the true capacity of these words to give rise to the right rhetoric or even left, but this is what I came across the sentence maker a tool to teach kids to make sentences. On adjusting the html source to serve our purpose, the sentence maker may be able to assimilate the words below based on programmed syntax of adjectives, adverbs,nouns and prepositions to give rise to a more comprehensive arrangement of words. Maybe cross connecting it with Babelfish we might be able to design the most powerful speech of words, sounds and grammar meaning different things in different languages. I wonder if such a thing like Abulafia is already sitting within one of Googles laboratories with its robotic mind plugged into Google Earth, Search engines, Blogger,Sketch up and numerous streams of data and applications, enabling control over media, money and power.

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