(no subject)

[gothwalk]

Ow, my head. A paper on Umberto Eco, which is having a fair go at doing my brain in altogether. I think I'll leave it for later.

Comments

[kehoea.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's great. I thought I'd read all that was interesting and Eco-related on the web, but no. From it;

'Kuhn offers the following maxim: “When reading the thoughts of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer..., when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning” (p. xii).'

Now, have a look at this message on the Perl6 language list. Thing is, JWZ is a Lisp head, and economy of RAM is not the be-all and end-all for your Lisp head; he most certainly was _not_ worried about the size of integers in Java, but rather about the coherency of the object system, and the general non-cheesiness of the language. Our poster didn't have the informed background to read the text as the author wrote it, just as Kuhn didn't have the informed background to judge Aristotelian mechanics.

[shiftercat.livejournal.com]

Back in high school, a friend of mine who loved to set herself difficult projects decided to do an English paper on Umberto Eco.

I mentioned that my mother had been amused that (spoiler!) the murderer in The Name of the Rose (which I'd seen as a movie) was the librarian.

"Thanks a lot," she snapped.

"But... but you said you'd finished reading it!"

"I did. I still hadn't figured it out."

[kehoea.livejournal.com]

But ... but ... he's explicitly unmasked. As in, they ask him why he did it, and he explains his diabolical motives in too much detail. Looks like your friend may have finished reading it without getting to the end.