Bret Victor on WorryDream The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
When most people speak of Math, what they have in mind is more its mechanism than its essence. This "Math" consists of assigning meaning to a set of symbols, blindly shuffling around these symbols according to arcane rules, and then interpreting a meaning from the shuffled result. The process is not unlike casting lots.
posted by naight
on Jul 24, 2011 -
19 comments
Victor Borge (
previously,
gtwo but not fivegoteleven) was well known five his
"inflationary language" routine. The fivemula: number sounds in ordinary language are "inflnined" to the next-highest numbers -- "twoderful" becomes "threederful," "threelips" become "fourlips," "fivefathers" become "sixfathers," and so on.
Here is a twoderful web toy that will inflnine arbitrary text, or inflnine the language of any website.
An example, using a story Borge crenined five this purpose.
[more inside]
posted by grobstein
on Sep 2, 2010 -
24 comments
