untitled by hannahelisabeth on Flickr.
Take your clairvoyance and apply it to your life in the physical, Presumptuous half-hearted homunculus, Self-destruction is the power without knowing what the function is.
Felipe Andres Coronel
Braavo! Braavo! Kuula, Arkadi… just niiviisi peavad tänapäeva noormehed väljenduma! Ime oleks, kui teil jüngreid poleks! Varemalt tuli noormeestel mõndagi õppida, ei tahetud ju nõmedusega kuulsaks saada, tahes-tahtmata tehti tööd. Aga nüüd tarvitseb neil vaid öelda, et kõik maailmas on rämps, - ja asi kombes. Noortel hea meel. Ja tõepoolest - enne olid nad lihtsalt tobud, nüüd aga on neist järsku saanud nihilistid.
Ivan Turgenev “Isad ja pojad” (1862)
Sometimes I think about what would have happened if Game of Life had been invented in antiquity. The concept is sufficiently simple for even a child to grasp and simplicity should have appealed to Pythagorean sensibilities…
Would they have developed standardized tokens for exploring the game, and would they have recognized it as a game?
Would there be biblical parables about the glider?
Would alternate rules have been considered heretical in the Middle Ages?
Would the R-pentomino have been thought an infinite growth pattern until some diligent mathematician, maybe an Arabic one in the 1000s, were to show the opposite by working out all 1103 generations?
Would the LWSS, the Gosper glider gun and related technology have been hailed as great inventions of the Renaissance?
Would the Gausses and the Eulers of this world have dedicated time to searching for new oscillator periods or spaceship velocities?
Would still lifes be tabulated by hand to stupendous numbers in the 1800s, and would these in modern days be memorized in a similar way digits of pi are now?
Would the entire concept have encouraged a considerably more rapid development of fields such as computability or signal processing?
Backwards/forwards time travel is overrated; I’d definitely rather explore alternate timelines…
National #demo2012 #6 by Marc Fairhurst on Flickr.
Wooded valley, probably Bolton Woods Lovers in a woodland clearing a pair, John Atkinson Grimshaw