Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to puzzle out the meaning of "The plant is the three pages just starred by an asterisk," ... -
Just putting this out there, since both the name Amber and the sun have been in the sync-stream. Yesterday, the preschoolers acted out a Chi...
-
I dreamt I had gone to see the Background Brethren in a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden. (Someone in the audience sitting near me ... -
This afternoon, I read this in Wendy Berg's Red Tree, White Tree , just one page after a statement that the race of Faerie "now exi... -
March 14: This is the usual Pi Day. It encodes 3.14, which is approximately 99.9493% of pi . July 22: This encodes 22/7, or approximately ...
-
My last post, " Many a Melchizedek ," about a sync involving the word many , quoted some Byrds lyrics. This morning I was reading ...
-
Remember Jorn Barger's "Elvis Index" from the golden age of the Internet? The idea was to use the Altavista search engine to q...
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).”
Post a Comment