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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... -
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 ... -
I dreamt that a very large man walked into the lobby of my school. He was maybe six foot six and looked like he weighed well over 400 pounds...
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It's been a while since I clicked for a randomly selected /x/ thread . I tried it today just in the spirit of "Is this thing on?... -
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...
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I dreamt that my wife bought me breakfast -- an ice-cream come, which I ate very slowly because it was a special kind of ice cream that woul... -
That video ends with questioning the validity of our childhood memories. I then checked my subscriptions and found a new short from Whit cal...
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Back on August 17, Bruce Charlton posted an episode from the old children's TV show Pipkins (which I had never heard of), in which Hart...
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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 ...
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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