[ExI] Captchas

[spike]

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of john clark
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2011 10:39 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] Captchas

 


On Sat, 8/13/11, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

"I have made an obsessive hobby of finding errors in books.  There is one
which is remarkably clean: Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden
Braid."

 

 

 

But they must be there, Hofstadter said he refused to change one word for
later editions of that great book, the publisher found some typos but
Hofstadter wouldn't let them change even that for the new editions, he
wanted the typos to remain and so they did.

 John K Clark

 

 

There was at least one that I think was intentional.  I had it marked as the
only typo I could find, but then later I realized it was a subtle gag on the
theme of atta.gccg. where he was talking about DNA and base pairs.

 

I agree with his notion of leaving them in there.  It will encourage geeks
to study the book to try to find them.

 

Your comment doesn't surprise me.  I had the privilege of meeting Hofstadter
once, at the Nerdstock at Stanford on 1 April 2000.  A couple things
surprised me about him: he is a small guy, about 5 ft 5 or so and thin.  The
other thing was that he seemed a bit irritable, annoyed by minor things,
such as they had set up a speaker's table without the traditional white
cloth.  But the audience at Nerdstock was so awed by that collection of Geek
Gods, we would never notice such details as a missing white table top cloth.

 

spike

 

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