idm

After a reread of Douglas Hofstadter’s “Crab Canon” I felt the (not entirely inexplicable) urge to revisit this palindromic quine.

Here is another Pythonic palindrome, with lines rather than characters as units. And in lieu of mere self-replication, it actually performs the almost-useful task of determining whether its input is palindromic.

import sys
r, s = "%s is", sys.argv[1]
sys.stdout.write(r % s)
r = "%s a palindrome.\n"
s = ["n't",""][int(s==s[::-1])]
r = "%s a palindrome.\n"
sys.stdout.write(r % s)
r, s = "%s is", sys.argv[1]
import sys

What ever happened to the movie song? What happened to Björk in her absurd swan dress, whispering and croaking to the audience with just half a duet? What happened to Elliott Smith in his favorite white suit — we miss you still, Elliott — rowing futilely against Celine Dion’s triple-octave range and the Hollywood Machine?

For starters, where was Peter Gabriel last night?

Match-ups that need settling:

• Yoshimi vs. the Pink Robots
• Master Chief vs. the Wicked Witch of the West
• Ned (the Pie Maker) vs. Goldfinger
• The Big Lebowski vs. Flavor Flav
• Snoop Dogg vs. Martha Stewart
• Catwoman vs. Cardinal Richelieu, with goonies
• Nicholas Tesla vs. Hackers
• Christopher Walken vs. David Bowie
• M. C. Escher vs. Stephen Hawking
• Daft Punk vs. HAL 9000
• Spider-Man vs. Barack Obama
• Cruella de Vil vs. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
• The Grinch vs. the RIAA
• Scientology vs. Steve Ballmer with chair
• Yoda vs. Morgan Freeman’s voice

Happy 1234567890th epoch second, paraskavedekatriaphilia day, and of course Saint Valentine’s eve, readers.

JavaScript aficionados are likely cognizant of two sexy next-generation JavaScript interpreters promised by upcoming editions of Firefox and Safari, improbably entitled SpiderMonkey and SquirrelFish, respectively.

I did learn today, however, that these monikers refer in fact to real animals. As one may expect from the nomenclature, the spider monkey is a monkey and the squirrelfish is a fish — who would’ve guessed?

Mind-blowingly: the spiderfish and squirrel monkey are also real.

Time to brainstorm some open-source project names in case more JavaScript interpreters come along. For starters, I’m thinking SkunkDuck or perhaps SparrowDog. Sheepwolf just tickles me so.

I imagine a computer could be built out of the precarious buoyancy of balloons. Each bit would be represented by a balloon in one of two possible states: grounded by a weighty anchor or untethered and free to rise — perhaps eventually enclosed so that it doesn’t float into the great bit bucket in the sky. One may proceed to perform fantastic Boolean logic on these balloons, preferably using Rube Goldberg-ian contraptions involving levers, pulleys, mice, toppling dominoes, sewing machines, aglets, and fire.

Then I wake up from my dream.