Things That Don’t Meta-Exist. Or do they?
Update 1220 hrs: No, they don’t.
Category: Discoveries
God to align the God
“By the energy of the alcohol
the virgin Mary was made man.”
The Nicene Creed, babeljacked. Man, I don’t know whether it’s funny or a million stories waiting to happen. Or maybe just a stupid Dan Brown book.
Also, “babel-” totally needs to be a prefix in the Futurologian Congress. PS Dear Leonard: can the Eater of Meaning maybe do this someday?
Reprostitution
Just so’s you’re aware, I’m a large.
The DBC of CS
Social engineering at its finest: SCIgen uses a context-free grammar to generate comp sci papers entirely too much like those from which I’ve been expected to learn for the past two years. It’s a little scary how good the results are. I was able to read the entire abstract of my personal paper while nodding my head, although the first clause of the introduction (“Unified metamorphic methodologies have led to many unfortunate advances”) broke the spell.
Oh, right, the social engineering part is that they got one of their generated papers accepted to a conference. Well-played, humans who probably remember daylight!
Further Keyhole obsession: I’ve finally proved to my satisfaction that New Circle Road in Lexington is not a circle, but a teardrop-shaped gob of snot headed southeast to Richmond.
For the record, I am SO WATCHING YOU.
Update 1040 hrs: I just spent like half a damn hour playing with this thing, flying all over Louisville and trying to figure out what looks like what from the air. I never properly understood how huge the (now-closed) Showcase Cinema parking lot was. Is. Also, if you get driving directions and superimpose them on the satellite images instead of the map? Things don’t quite line up, so to get anywhere it is apparently necessary to tear up a lot of lawns and drive directly down the median of the highway.
The National Geographic Explorer we’re watching right now (“Lost Treasures of Afghanistan,” I think) is pretty amazing. The focus of the episode is on the possible recovery of a thousand-foot-long sleeping Buddha and the definite recovery of a cache of Bactrian tomb gold bigger than Tutankhamen’s. The smaller stories are what get to me, though. The librarians at the Afghan Film Archive handed over all their printed film to the Taliban to burn, but hid the negatives in a secret room behind a false wall. The curators of the art museum in Kabul knew that the depiction of living beings was forbidden, so they altered oil portraits to still lifes by painting watercolors on top; when the regime fell, they just wiped away the watercolor layers, and the originals were unharmed. Desperate genius.
I think 360 is my new favorite song. If you understand why, you probably also understand why I like Modern Humor Authority so much.