First of all, XKCD is amazing. Second of all, if you don't know, Douglas Hofstadter is, like, the captain of all things meta. Thereby making this cartoon funny:
Here's the weekend blog, folks - I'll be gone for two days. Story below brought to you by Richard Lyon, father and meta-nerd.... * My first exposure to meta, besides meta-physics, which I took to mean religion, and therefore not nearly as interesting as physics, was the meta key on keyboards at the MIT AI Artificial Intelligence lab in the late 1970s. They had invented this moby text editor called "emacs" (according to its radical inventor rms, NOT named for the nearby Boston ice-cream shop, Emack & Bolio's , which was named for a couple of homeless guys , even if the text justifier "bolio" was so named). Emacs used what we call "control" or "modifier" keys to control its actions; but "ctrl" was not enough--no, they also had super, meta , and hyper, not to mention front, shift, and top on their space-cadet keyboards . Typical long-form commands were like "meta-x query replace"; here the text "qu...
When you read xkcd, you always need to check out the ALT-text (hover your mouse on the image). For this one, it's:
ReplyDelete"This is the reference implementation of the self-referential joke."