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May 4 , 2007
Can tags be wrong?:
You tag it potato. I tag it tomato. Shall we just call the whole thing off?
Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing.com, asked me an excellent question: Can tags be wrong? What if everyone in a room is an idiot and tags Moby-Dick as "penguin." I sputtered for a moment and then came up with the perfect response: "Is there a wrong way to underline a book?" Brilliant! It surrounds a tiny germ of truth with a massive coating of tasty misdirection, like rising to a challenge in one's proof of the Turing Incompleteness Theorem by faking a coughing fit. Tim afterwards sent me a thoughtful and thought-provoking message. So blame him for the following...
More of everything:
The Internet is swamp of lies. The Internet is a haven of knowledge. Yes to both.
Whatever case you want to make about the Internet, you can make. Want to show that it contains the most wretched ideas and images? There's a whole bunch of sites you can point to. Want to prove that it is the salvation of democracy and rational discourse? Google and ye shall find. Want to show that it's a haven for red-headed sociopaths who raise chihuahuas for their milk? Yup, you can probably find those sites, too.
Twittering away:
What looks trivial may turn out to be, up close, not so trivial after all.
Book notes: "Everything Is Miscellaneous" launched a couple of days ago. You thought I wasn't going to mention it?
Bogus Contest: Elevator Pitch: Can you come up with the Everything Is Miscellaneous elevator pitch? Lord knows, I can't. |
Posted
by D. Weinberger at May 5, 2007 06:58 PM
Comments
That would be Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, not Turing's, although they worked together quite a bit. It is correct in the article, so this is only a minor transgression.
Posted by: Benjamin Kudria | May 5, 2007 10:58 PM
Or, given the context, it may have been an friendly tomato launch at the readers, or at best, "Turing's Incompleteness Theorem" as documented in http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Turing_incompleteness
Too obscure for me either way.
If it's truly just an oversight and not a thinko, somebody needs to write David an app that \generates/ his email from his article.
Posted by: Bob Morris | May 6, 2007 08:10 AM
It was a thinko that I caught and fixed in the version posted on the Web and emailed to subscribers, but didn't back-fix when in the table of contents I'd extracted for this blog post :(
In grad school, our logic prof regenerated Godel's proof line by line on a chalkboard (pre-whiteboard), which took an hour and a quarter. I joined in the applause at the end, and then promptly forgot the proof entirely.
Posted by: David Weinberger | May 6, 2007 01:03 PM