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Borges' Vision
16 years ago
My dude, the rockstar, J. L. Borges, once wrote a story (or was it?) about an encyclopedia article describing one aspect of a seperate world, Orbis Tertius, which (or was it?) was merely a conspiracy among a circle of intellectuals to completely invent (and so create?) a world, Tlon.
All furries: please stop, read Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and then get back to work. Imagination has consequences, and we are part of a conspiracy.
All furries: please stop, read Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and then get back to work. Imagination has consequences, and we are part of a conspiracy.
The original founder's prohibition of course applies exactly as Tlon describes it.
the story you mentioned above in the chapters on Paradox and Meaning
the essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" in the chapter on Categories
the essay "Avatars of the Tortoise" in the chapter on The Impossible
the fascinating story "The Garden of Forking Paths" in the chapter on NP-Completeness
and the (impossible) map described by Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares in their "Extraordinary Tales" in the chapter on Omniscience
(are you there God? it's me Margaret )
sounds like this Borges is a keeper what collections of his would you recommend?
I also recommend William Noel and Reviel Netz 's "The Archimedes Codex" I know the technology can be expensive, but couldn't some of the simpler methods be used to finally break down the Voynich Manuscript? quoted in Poundstone's book
"What appears to be a cipher table on the first page has long since faded into illegibility" can't modern imaging finally extract this key? it may be our last best 'hope'
The only other thing I've ever read that ever quite hit my intellectual sweet spot in a similar fashion (well, I mean, aside from some Hesse and Hofstadter's nonfiction Godel, Escher, Bach), is Sam Delany's "Tales of Neveryon." Well, and on past that, there's LeGuin's Orsinian tales, but that's getting rather far afield from the original impulse.
I shall have to look up this "Archimedes Codex!"
Johnson appears to be mining the same terrain as Malcolm Gladwell's sharp "Blink" and "Outliers", Gary Marcus's "Kluge" and George Lakoff's "The Political Mind" which reaffirm the great Bismarck's maxim
"Political genius consists of hearing the distant hoofbeat of the horse of history and then leaping to catch the passing horseman by the coattails"
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/
i bet you would also like "Secrets of the Vaulted Sky" by David Berlinski