The Universe of Discourse

[dougo]

Nowadays Mark-Jason Dominus is mainly known as a Perl demigod, but back in the early '90s I used to enjoy his site at U. Penn, with various Borges-inspired short stories and other things strange and interesting. He recently started a Web journal (syndicated on LiveJournal as markdominus) that has been pretty fascinating. The sheer volume of high-quality essays makes me think he had a backlog of stuff to write about, but maybe it will continue for a while. Here are some of the things I've enjoyed:

• On Ben Franklin's 300th birthday, he posted his favorite quote from Franklin, about why he stopped being a vegetarian: So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do. Edit: follow the link for the full quote, it's funny.
• A post about an unorthodox non-recursive algorithm for generating permutations of balanced parentheses, with a long discussion of how he came up with the idea.
• A post about discovering some accidental syntax in Perl. I posted about this to Lambda the Ultimate and got a couple of amusing examples in response: the "goes toward" operator in C, and defining new infix functions in C++. I was hoping for something from Common Lisp or Haskell, but nothing turned up.
• A theory about why the Bible seems to say that π = 3, but might actually be using a sort of Hebrew pun: QW and QWH are alternate spellings for "circumference", but also represent the numbers 106 and 111, and 111/106 happens to be a very good approximation for π/3.
• In a followup post, he quotes John Wilkins from 1638 excusing factual errors in the Bible: From all these scriptures it is clearly manifest that it is a frequent custom of the Holy Ghost to speak of natural things, rather according to their appearance and common opinion, than the truth itself.