Trivia à la Markov
Trivial facts can be entertaining. But they’re only more entertaining when they’ve been scrambled through a Markov chain algorithm [Link changed 2006-05-24 to Wayback Machine, as the original post has disappeared]. (“What’s a Markov chain”, you ask? Well, here’s a description of the process.)
Want to create your own Markovized texts? Perhaps the most famous Markov chainer is the punnily named Mark V. Shaney, for DOS/Windows systems. There’s also a version of Mark written in the Python scripting language (note: for more recent versions of Python, you’ll have to change all occurrences of “rand” into “random”), as well as a GPLed C source by Tim Musson that’s based upon it.
