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You’ve probably heard of the “acrostic” — a poem that is written such that the first letter in each line spells out a word, going downwards. But did you know that John Cage developed his own poetic form that riffs off this? In his version, the new word runs up the spine of the poem: It’s a letter in the center of each line that spells out a word. Cage called it the “mesostic”, using the greek word “mesos” for “middle.”
From a page devoted to mesostics, this is one of Cage’s earliest attempts:
| the b | Eautiful |
| o | Xen are |
| ro | Aming |
| a | Mong us |
| op | Portunity is |
| be | Laboring |
| th | Em |
Ah, but now the fun begins. Over at his blog euph0r1a, Matthew McCabe has created the “Mesostomatic” — a little web tool for automatically generating mesostics! Pump in the words you want the mesostic to spell, a URL for the engine to scrape text from, and presto: It generates one. I had it spell out Collision Detection — bien sur — and use text from Arts and Letters Daily. The result is after the jump!
| Criticism, | |
| debate b | Ody |
| austra | Lian beirut |
| dai | Ly |
| mon | Itor chicago |
| ob | Server |
| h | Indu the |
| p | Ost london |
| a | Ngeles |
| heral | D
smh |
| tuft | E no |
| To | |
| am | Ericans russians |
| Camus canadians | |
| s | Tone’s |
| mansf | Ield james |
| On | |
| warmi | Ng |
Not really all that poetic, but kinda interesting nonetheless..
(Thanks to Erik Weissengruber for this one!)
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
» see all of my photos on Flickr
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A long German word for "noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history"
