Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

Gerry Quinn · 18 Dec 2011, 20:04 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 20:04:51 -0000
Subject: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
In-Reply-To: <4EEE104B.3070305 at verizon.net>
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Message-ID: <D39CC8F5F7714353A0ED8BD13DAAA4CA@Rover>



From: David Stockhoff 

On 12/18/2011 10:51 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:

> > Severian was certainly not responsible for Dorcas?s death, so placing 
> > him as the witch (or wicked fairy, in the canonical version of 
> > Sleeping Beauty) is absurd.

> Christ, Gerry. He raised her from the dead. No one said he was wicked.
Then trying to make a correspondence between him and the witch in the story (either story) is ridiculous.


> > If you want to change every aspect of the story, and even what story 
> > it is, what is the point of your argument? When you say ?there is no 
> > 1:1" relationship?, then, given the sort of relationships you are 
> > apparently willing to propose, you are tacitly admitting that there is 
> > no relationship at all. Because admitting the sort of relationships 
> > you are proposing now would imply that every book should be discussed 
> > as if it reconstituted the Library of Babel.

> Please be specific, or no one will know what you mean.
It is you who are failing to be specific.  You don?t even know what fairy tale you?re talking about.

> > There is a vague resonance with Sleeping Beauty when a beautiful woman 
> > is resurrected. Just as there is a vague resemblance between Dr. Talos 
> > and a stuffed fox. Discussing the stuff that you are suggesting is 
> > meaningful ? for example the ?enchantment? you claimed Dorcas is under 
> > ? is the equivalent of discussing the horsehair Talos is stuffed with, 
> > and what colour horse it came from.


> Have you ever considered introducing the concept of figurative language 
> to your programming? You are a marvel of AI engineering, but your 
> insistence on tackling literature that your analytical routines can't 
> handle betrays you. Or are you just trying to become human, like Data on 
> Star Trek?

There?s a difference between figurative language and un-thought-out nonsense.  I?m sorry if it discomfits you that I can distinguish between them.

- Gerry Quinn


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