[lbo-talk] a Bob Herbert bot

[Colin Brace]

According to Nancy Kruh of The Dallas Morning News, veteran New York
Times columnist Bob Herbert has been stuck in a rut for years. "For
several months now," Kruh writes, "as I've read one Iraq war column
after another, one thought always comes to mind: Um, haven't I read
this before? So, yesterday, I finally immersed myself in Lexis-Nexis
to try to quantify and qualify this phenomenon."

What Kruh discovered is that many of Herbert's columns during the Bush
presidency contain similar, interchangeable passages. She cites a
number of examples that make it seem like your average Herbert column
is just a random recombination of wording from earlier columns.

Given the paper's recent stock performance and rumblings from restless
investors, I thought I'd help the Times find ways to put out the same
product for less money. So I spent about fifteen minutes writing
software that can generate Bob Herbert columns while using a minimal
amount of our Earth's precious resources.

Behold "Automatic Bob", the Bob Herbert column generator:

http://brain-terminal.com/posts/2006/05/02/automatic-bob-herbert

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  Colin Brace

  Amsterdam