(no subject)
Apr. 15th, 2008 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackWikihistory (Desmond Warzel)
(link)
"Wikihistory is a delightful science fiction short story by Desmond Warzel in the form of a series of messages posted to a time-travellers' forum." Via someone.
A Plan for Scams (Daniel Franke)
(Link)
In which Achilles and the Tortoise discuss plans for an Eliza system to automatically generate plausible gullible responses to 419 scams (and so make it impossible for scammers to pick out real victims).
Achilles: I'm drafting a letter from Hooke, Lynn, Fischer & Pierre, partners at law.
T: I wasn't aware you had any legal training.
A: You know all that email in your junk folder purporting to come from rich Nigerian widows with jammed caps lock keys?
It's fascinating, because titillatingly humorous and philosophical T&A dialogues[1] can be traced back like language family trees. It started with Zeno's Paradox, but they never spoke to each other. Then Lewis Carroll appropriated them for a humorous dialogue, which Doug Hofstadter in turn copied extensively in Godel, Escher Bach.
I'm going out on a limb and guessing the majority of modern dialogues are descended from Hofstadter (like, Zeno = hieroglyphics, Caroll = proto-cananite alphabet, Hofstadter = phoenician :)) Yet amazingly they all seem to carry through the same style, one that appeals to be dearly. I noticed the same thing with Victor Mollo, somehow the characters are so alive it's hard to write them wrongly :)
[1] Cartesian Law: If a variety of initials are equally descriptive, then the one with the dodgiest alternative meaning will be used. And you can never be sure if it's just coincidence, and it's just _you_ who has a dirty mind, or if it's a definite trend.[2]
[2] Unless there's a helpful footnote.
ONN: FCC Okays Nudity on TV if it's Alyson Hannigan
(Link, plays video)
From the Onion. I love that just about the whole headline is the URL. I haven't watched the video, I just thought the title was so perfect.
(link)
"Wikihistory is a delightful science fiction short story by Desmond Warzel in the form of a series of messages posted to a time-travellers' forum." Via someone.
A Plan for Scams (Daniel Franke)
(Link)
In which Achilles and the Tortoise discuss plans for an Eliza system to automatically generate plausible gullible responses to 419 scams (and so make it impossible for scammers to pick out real victims).
Achilles: I'm drafting a letter from Hooke, Lynn, Fischer & Pierre, partners at law.
T: I wasn't aware you had any legal training.
A: You know all that email in your junk folder purporting to come from rich Nigerian widows with jammed caps lock keys?
It's fascinating, because titillatingly humorous and philosophical T&A dialogues[1] can be traced back like language family trees. It started with Zeno's Paradox, but they never spoke to each other. Then Lewis Carroll appropriated them for a humorous dialogue, which Doug Hofstadter in turn copied extensively in Godel, Escher Bach.
I'm going out on a limb and guessing the majority of modern dialogues are descended from Hofstadter (like, Zeno = hieroglyphics, Caroll = proto-cananite alphabet, Hofstadter = phoenician :)) Yet amazingly they all seem to carry through the same style, one that appeals to be dearly. I noticed the same thing with Victor Mollo, somehow the characters are so alive it's hard to write them wrongly :)
[1] Cartesian Law: If a variety of initials are equally descriptive, then the one with the dodgiest alternative meaning will be used. And you can never be sure if it's just coincidence, and it's just _you_ who has a dirty mind, or if it's a definite trend.[2]
[2] Unless there's a helpful footnote.
ONN: FCC Okays Nudity on TV if it's Alyson Hannigan
(Link, plays video)
From the Onion. I love that just about the whole headline is the URL. I haven't watched the video, I just thought the title was so perfect.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-15 11:57 pm (UTC)do you mean Tortoise & Achilles dialogues, or philosophical dialogues in general?
Yes, I meant T&A dialogues. I've no idea what would be most common philosophical dialogue is in general; Platonic sounds like a good guess, certainly the most traditional, but I've no overview; it's likely to be "something I've never heard of" really.
In the former case I'd hardly call that going out on a limb;
:) In truth, I don't think I had any other examples in mind, I just felt sure that other people _must_ have followed the idea, and certainly hope they have.
I like Hofstader's GEB very much, and many people I know do too, but I don't know how universal that is: I think Caroll must surely be more famous in general, so would not have liked to guess whose dialogues were more widely known. And for that matter, I loved GEB a lot, and I think only read Caroll's dialogue in that, so probably don't have a clear idea how much of the sense of the characters was already present in that, and how much Hofstadter drew out himself. Maybe Hofstadter's are more stealing-worthy, but I wouldn't be able to judge; the languages analogy appealed to me so much I had to include it :)