(Untitled)

[darius]

The passage in my last post came from The Lord of the Rings: the first sentence of the climactic paragraph where Sam stands on Mount Doom and sees Sauron's works fall to ruin. I just reformatted it

Comments

[atheorist]

Would you expect these sections of verse to be similar to the Bible code stuff - that is, any longish text contains a moderate amount of verse to be discovered? Don't get me wrong - I think it's totally awesome, regardless of whether it's similar to the Bible code effect.

One way to test might be to compare the frequency of verse (above a certain length, say) between a text and the same text, shuffled.

[darius]

Absolutely. I'd guess all of these passages quoted here in this post are coincidental, though it's interesting that the Austen one occurs at a pretty important moment of the story. I think the Mount Doom passage is not a coincidence, whether or not it was deliberate, and that Austen's style is less iambic overall.

Shuffling the words would be easy -- I oughta try that. http://github.com/darius/versecop/blob/master/passages.py for the code.

Hi there, I don't think we've met.

[atheorist]

Hi, yes, I'm a random interenet person. I was following you because of some interest that we shared. You apparently do neat stuff.

[darius]

Thanks! Nice to meet you -- that is quite an overlap in the interests list.

[ruht]

I said to myself, that sure sounds like Tolkien. But then I noted that you said it was a trick question, . . .

[darius]

Good job. :) Maybe I should've just said it was prose reformatted as verse, but I hoped the mystery twist would please some readers.