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A Lassie-like library lion, and a ceiling fan on Mars
The Animalia illustration of lions in a library, one of them with Lassie Come Home in its mouth, recently reentered the sync-stream in ...
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Disclaimer: My terms are borrowed (by way of Terry Boardman and Bruce Charlton) from Rudolf Steiner, but I cannot claim to be using them in ... -
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... -
I’ve been sailing all my life now Never harbor or port have I known The wide universe is the ocean I travel And the earth is my blue boat ho...
2 comments:
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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