This video, “Four Letter Words,” is cool for several reasons. First of all, this engineer has found a way to depict all 26 letters in an arrangement of fluorescent bars; the linguistic equivalent of a digital clock radio display. Secondly, the words that come up are entirely of the computer’s choosing. They are assembled by an algorithm from a word association database.
So, yeah. Those strings of words were actually chosen by the computer, itself. HAL seems rather repressed. I’d leave those pod bay doors closed if I were you.
And here is the proof. I realize that there is no special significance to this diagram given the arbitrariness of English, and the fact that pi is a Greek character, but still, a worthy effort.
This diagram reminds me of the time I did a Fibonacci derivative of the Fibonacci sequence and was left with numbers which corresponded to letters that were an anagram of “magic hoax.” Think some of us are trying a little bit too desperately to find meaning amongst the nothingness? Pi is an irrational number, they say, but its got nothing on human beings.
