Conway’s Game of Hope
A beautifully Borgesian fable.
Link tags: borges
8
28c3: The Science of Insecurity - YouTube
I understand less than half of this great talk by Meredith L. Patterson, but it ticks all my boxes: Leibniz, Turing, Borges, and Postel’s Law.
(via Tim Berners-Lee)
An Interview with Nick Harkaway: Algorithmic Futures, Literary Fractals, and Mimetic Immortality - Los Angeles Review of Books
Nick Harkaway on technology in fiction:
Humans without tools are not magically pure; they’re just unvaccinated, cold, and wet.
SF is how we get to know ourselves, either who we are or who we might be. In terms of what is authentically human, SF has a claim to be vastly more honest and important than a literary fiction that refuses to admit the existence of the modern and goes in search of a kind of essential humanness which exists by itself, rather than in the intersection of people, economics, culture, and science which is where we all inevitably live. It’s like saying you can only really understand a flame if you get rid of the candle. Good luck with that.
And on Borges:
He was a genius, and he left this cryptic, brilliant body of work that’s poetic, incomplete, astonishing. It’s like a tasting menu in a restaurant where they let you smell things that go to other tables and never arrive at yours.
Keeper of the Clock
An unfolding series of vignettes written by Danny Hillis back in 2010. It’s all very Borgesian.
Jeremy Keith | < A > | HTML Special, CSS Day on Vimeo
The video of my talk on hypertext at the HTML Special before CSS Day. I’m pretty pleased with my delivery here. There’s a bit of Q&A afterwards as well.
Library of Babel
This is simply wondrous! A microcosm of Borges’s story made real on the world wide web.
We do not simply generate and store books as they are requested — in fact, the storage demands would make that impossible. Every possible permutation of letters is accessible at this very moment in one of the library’s books, only awaiting its discovery.
The Aleph: Infinite Wonder / Infinite Pity
Just like in the Borges short story, you can now see everything at once …from Project Gutenberg, or from Twitter, or from both.
This may be the only legitimate use case for (truly) infinite scrolling.
Being is a Verb | Necessary Trouble
Some great thoughts on the language of the web.