New Year's Eve musings
Dec. 31st, 2002 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirAd Mundo Exteriore,
Annoying LotR Article of the Day: Business Day, in the New York Times. The author was talking about New Zealand tourism industry capitalizing off of being the site for the filming of the LotR movie. It was all very fine and nice, or would have been if the author didn't keep using such phrases as "elfin forest" and "elfin powers". -_- Do you know the mile-wide difference between "elfin" and "elven"? The former brings to mind little garden pixies! And Tolkien did very adamantly insist on the "v" in "elves" and "dwarves". I was screaming and jumping up and down and generally throwing a fit. My parents stared and asked each other whether I was sane.
The answer of course is, no.
The article however redeems itself for mentioning that they're considering building a Lord of the Rings museum showcasing over 400,000 of the movie props currently warehoused in New Zealand. ::squeals (for once):: Aaah! I need to get a plane ticket!
My relatives called from Korea today, and Father and I made dumplings. It was a very good New Year's Eve, except for the fact that I still have to write my HUNS paper...
La-di-da...Further progress in Godel, Escher, Bach has proven delightful. There was this dialogue called "Ant Fugue", which compared anthills to brains in a rather charming way. The dialogue preceding this one was called "Prelude...". Makes you wonder at the cleverness of the author in finding an analogy to address a subject that also provides a pun like "Prelude...Ant Fugue". Oh, and in between there was this pun Lierre de Fourmi, a fictional anthill who discovered the converse, so to speak, of Fermat's Last Theorem. That n^a + n^b = n^c has an infinite number of solutions when n=2, but no solutions when n>2. This is of course a Diophantine equation, and Lierre de Fourmi supposedly discovered his Well-Tested Conjecture when reading Arithmetica by Di of Antus, mirroring the way Fermat thought up his theorem while reading Arithmetica by Diophantus. Even more clever that one can create such a pun on Diophantus' name to reflect all the other ant puns going around...Lierre de Fourmi by the way means "bridge of ants", which reflects an actual behavior of ants that illustrates Hofstadter's whole point about anthills. It was really amusing, to say the least.
...Tari
Annoying LotR Article of the Day: Business Day, in the New York Times. The author was talking about New Zealand tourism industry capitalizing off of being the site for the filming of the LotR movie. It was all very fine and nice, or would have been if the author didn't keep using such phrases as "elfin forest" and "elfin powers". -_- Do you know the mile-wide difference between "elfin" and "elven"? The former brings to mind little garden pixies! And Tolkien did very adamantly insist on the "v" in "elves" and "dwarves". I was screaming and jumping up and down and generally throwing a fit. My parents stared and asked each other whether I was sane.
The answer of course is, no.
The article however redeems itself for mentioning that they're considering building a Lord of the Rings museum showcasing over 400,000 of the movie props currently warehoused in New Zealand. ::squeals (for once):: Aaah! I need to get a plane ticket!
My relatives called from Korea today, and Father and I made dumplings. It was a very good New Year's Eve, except for the fact that I still have to write my HUNS paper...
La-di-da...Further progress in Godel, Escher, Bach has proven delightful. There was this dialogue called "Ant Fugue", which compared anthills to brains in a rather charming way. The dialogue preceding this one was called "Prelude...". Makes you wonder at the cleverness of the author in finding an analogy to address a subject that also provides a pun like "Prelude...Ant Fugue". Oh, and in between there was this pun Lierre de Fourmi, a fictional anthill who discovered the converse, so to speak, of Fermat's Last Theorem. That n^a + n^b = n^c has an infinite number of solutions when n=2, but no solutions when n>2. This is of course a Diophantine equation, and Lierre de Fourmi supposedly discovered his Well-Tested Conjecture when reading Arithmetica by Di of Antus, mirroring the way Fermat thought up his theorem while reading Arithmetica by Diophantus. Even more clever that one can create such a pun on Diophantus' name to reflect all the other ant puns going around...Lierre de Fourmi by the way means "bridge of ants", which reflects an actual behavior of ants that illustrates Hofstadter's whole point about anthills. It was really amusing, to say the least.
...Tari
