free variable

Josh Parsons, whose excellent aesthetic evaluation of world flags I’ve linked to in the past, has a great perl script online that generates pseudo-Tractarian epigrams. Sample output:

15 Russell’s merit is to have shown that the logical symbolism of Frege and Russell is a fact.

15.1 Propositions stand to one another in that total relation that holds between questions.

15.11 An atomic symbol is determined by the propositions, and by these being all the propositions.

15.111 Roughly speaking: every structure is also a senseless tautology.

15.112 In logic, every fact is also every picture: the atomic object itself is, so to speak, a substance.

15.113 It is clear that everything exists independently of the reality itself.

This is truly hilarious stuff, on several levels. My inner nerd, though, secretly pines for distinct “Pears/McGuinness” and “Ogden” versions. (For a chaser, track down Mark Pilgrim’s auto-generated Kant or elsewhere.org’s classic postmodernism generator.)

I’m currently listening to Double – From Partita For Violin Solo No.1 in B minor from the album “Segovia Collection vol. 4: J.S. Bach” by Andrès Segovia