Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au> writes:
> At 10:52 AM 4/01/01 +0100, Anders wrote:
>
> >They also used it as a weapon during the Great War, according to a
> >mock documentary in the skit: british soldiers who did not speak
> >German learned one line each, and then read it aloud.
>
> Who did the German translation in the first place?
Kamikaze linguists? :-)
A bit like the kamikaze chaperonin that puts together a protease from
the inside and once it has got the enzyme into the right shape is
immediately disassembled.
> Yes, I *know* I'm being absurdly pedantic about a nice running gag. The
> self-undermining self-recursion is half the fun. But I have this theory,
> see. I reckon the laugh-till-you-die joke must have been devised in the
> first place by an Asperger person, or maybe a Martian, or perhaps even an
> AI program [run on a Babbage Engine, I guess]. It would have to be written
> down initially by some critter that could *predict* the dire effect on a
> standard human brain-body, while escaping those toxic consequences.
Hmm, Godel assassination? Might be something to include in my Orion's
Arm setting, where there are actually some amoral superintelligences
for hire. I can see it now, the magazine "Jupiter Brain of
Fortune"... :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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