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Knowledge is baking powder, France is baking.
Last night (the night of April 17), I visited Engrish.com , a site I used to check fairly regularly but hadn't been to in, oh, years pro...
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Following up on the idea that the pecked are no longer alone in their bodies , reader Ben Pratt has brought to my attention these remarks by... -
In my recently posted notes on John 5:1-18 , I said, "I do not believe the Old Testament contains a single unambiguous reference to Go...
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1. The traditional Marseille layout Tarot de Marseille decks stick very closely to the following layout for the Bateleur's table. Based ...
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No one gets this, do they?
It's a famous photo. What's she reading? How does it end?
I got the joke, because of Douglas Hofstadter's book Metamagical Themas. In it he describes a software function called READERS-DIGEST-CONDENSED-VERSION, which reduces a long list of words to its first and last words. When he applies it to the entire text of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (treating it as a big long sequence of words), the result is the shorter sequence ('riverrun 'the). He then described a hypothetical artificial intelligence algorithm called REJOYCE, which would take a first and last word as input, and reconstruct a novel using those first and last words.
“It would be nice as well as useful if we could create an inverse operation to readers-digest-condensed-version called rejoyce that, given any two words, would create a novel beginning and ending with them, respectively—and such that James Joyce would have written it (had he thought of it). Thus execution of the Lisp statement (rejoyce 'Stately 'Yes) would result in the Lisp genie generating from scratch the entire novel Ulysses. Writing this function is left as an exercise for the reader. To test your program, see what it does with (rejoyce 'karma 'dharma).”
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