A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles

by prabodh • 17 years ago

54 10 17 years ago

euroclydon• 17 years ago

Couldn't really finish it, but it reminded me that life is short and that there are a lot more fun things out there to do and think about than yet another business app: Stories, Art, the intersection of fantasy and reality.

Freebytes• 17 years ago

I found the article very fun and interesting. Mixing print-outs with drawings of which pictures are taken to be the images in the article was a nice twist.

drallison• 17 years ago

An outstanding presentation both in terms of content and presentation.

michael_dorfman2• 17 years ago

I half agree.

The presentation was, indeed, outstanding. The content was half-a-click above 'meh'. Honestly, were there any ideas here that you don't think were common knowledge to the average HN reader?

pohl• 17 years ago

Are you suggesting that novel-idea-density is the average HN reader's sole metric for measuring content? You might be right. I certainly fall into that rut more often than I'd like. I suspect it gives me a dopamine rush.

I liked this piece for the interesting historical miscellany that it pulled together, and for the narrative and visualization on scales of complexity. It got bonus points for including A Humument, which I bought back when I was going through a Douglas Hofstadter phase. (He mentioned it in Metamagical Themas.)

crux2• 17 years ago

I suspect it is the very rare average HN reader who has spent any time this morning idly wondering whether a computer built out of matchboxes to play Go would be bigger or smaller than the Crab Nebula.

crux2• 17 years ago

I absolutely love the color design on that website. Which, considering it consisted of a single color of underlines and a sharpie, is pretty good.

aarongough• 17 years ago

I started reading this with the idea of just taking a cursory glance, but the slides really drew me in. I ended up reading the whole thing!

The whole thing seems like good clean fun, the author is obviously an interesting and quirky sort of guy...

diN0bot• 17 years ago

> "which first counted normally in some series, such as addition by 2—“0... 2... 4... 6...”—until they grew restless, when it would suddenly add not 2, but 74, or 117, or some other, defiantly not-2 number."

is this because it was in fact computing a different but intended function, or was it a random bug? and was it a bug intentionally added by babbage or inexplicable?

i'm trying to figure out what the below quote means

> "This, claimed Babbage, represented the sudden, miraculous change—reality was pre-programmed with unexpected events which demonstrated the changing will of God."

A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles

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