Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 295.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2000 10:14:05 +0100
From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: 14.0277 methodological primitives
From: Osher Doctorow, osher@ix.netcom.com, Wed. Sept. 27, 2000, 6:02AM
Dear Colleagues,
I commend the discussants [don't be concerned about my coining words - I it
all the time, at no expense to myself] of methodological primitives,
including myself, for their zeal if not their concise summarizing skills. I
myself was obscure in one of my earlier contributions. However, I have been
awakened from my meditations concerning Ovid's Metamorphoses by the somewhat
remarkable contribution of Wendell Piez, 9-2-00, 9:24:28. In comparing it
with my succinct contribution in which I disposed of all of political
history and prehistory in one page (actually, in one sentence, but I am
being open-minded), Wendell used approximately 2 - 1/2 pages to discuss one
aspect of computer programming. I am not currently collecting paper for
recycling, but there is the matter of the trees (versus the forest?). As a
mathematician and physicist, I cannot quite consider that Wendell's
contribution exceeds all of political history and prehistory. I have been
curious in the past as to the skills required to be a computer/systems
programmer/engineer/operator, as I seem to only relate to them at an
extremely complex theoretical level (von Neumann and beyond), and I think
that one of the skills seems to be the "ability or desire to produce complex
nonsense". I myself did this in my previously obscure contribution, but
for me it is unfortunately rather rare. However, my deceased colleague
Isaac Asimov in his Foundation Series proposed measuring the nonsense
content of sentences and speeches using extremely advanced technology (which
has so far defied computer programmers' abilities), and he typically
concluded that sentences usually contain 100% nonsense. Could I prevail
upon Wendell to possibly restate his thesis, if any, in one sentence
comparable to my political history-prehistory declaration that permutations
of A, B, and N in Shakespearean play contexts contain all the content of
political history-prehistory?
Yours Faithfully,
Osher Doctorow
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 10/03/00 EDT