Comments on: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

hoverboards don't work on water — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:35:53 -0800

2 4 8 16 32 64... Storybytes, an ordered archive of nanofiction. It's been done before, by syllables (17), by the masters (Classic Short Stories), and by comedians (Book-a-Minute). But in a dense natural language, with a high meaning-per-word, perhaps bytes would value infodensity more objectively: 256b, 1k, 4Kb. But then again, isn't a spec as much of a cop out as a rigged dictionary? Perhaps the highest infodensities are achieved by works which will have no human readers .

By: JeffK

JeffK — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 13:18:16 -0800

Um . . . . what?

By: blendor

blendor — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 13:41:09 -0800

OK, I get the brevity thing. So what's with the title?

By: aparrish

aparrish — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 14:00:31 -0800

The entries with lengths of 2, 4, 6, and 8 words are all kind of lame. They remind me of that compression algorithm that compresses a file with arbitrary data down to zero bytes by copying the data into the filename.

By: chococat

chococat — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 14:53:19 -0800

I thought it was going to be a thread about Lost.

By: maud

maud — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:07:12 -0800

So what's with the title? Here's some background.

By: Citizen Premier

Citizen Premier — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 16:58:28 -0800

The two word story "Death of a Duck Hunter" was certainly good.

By: .kobayashi.

.kobayashi. — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 17:29:14 -0800

good stuff, thanks.

By: es_de_bah

es_de_bah — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 17:31:58 -0800

This is great. But the two word ones are cheating with their long titles, no?