I had a dream that I was involved in a huge project to build an Inform
model of the South of Market and the Mission, to be used in a very
sophisticated adventure game. One thing that made the dream more exciting
was that I was inside the model the whole time, although it was
clear that what I was seeing was somehow generated by Inform, and I could
converse with other people about the progress of the model ("This is
so-and-so's apartment -- in the next version we're going to add a door over
here and a daemon that shows changes in the apartment over time"), which
was actually kind of like David Gelernter's Mirror Worlds,
although I didn't think of that at the time.
My virtual South of Market is a very exciting and dramatic place!
It's great that there are people who critique pop songs by reference to
ancient philosophers.
I'm going to the Richard Dawkins lecture at Berkeley tonight (VLSB, 8:30p).
I may try to get my copy of The Selfish Gene autographed.
Some years ago, I made a t-shirt that says "Life results from the non-random
survival of randomly varying replicators. -- Richard Dawkins"; if it still
fit me and if it looked decent, I'd wear it to the talk. But I can't even
find it, which is yet another problem. (That was what Richard Dawkins said
was the "t-shirt slogan" version of his work.)
On Crackmonkey, I wrote that the intricacy of ancient Greek verb structure
led to many British prep school students learning things like the
present subjunctive first-person middle dual of "luo", no doubt so
that, if two of them were ever captured by extremely ancient Greeks,
they could sing a duet in which they discuss with their captors the
possibility that they might ransom themselves.
This led indirectly to the relevation that Mr. Bad (who else?) is the holder
of eleutheria.org.
