When I read books I use white paper bookmarks so that I can jot down new words to look up. or pithy statements or clever insights worth quoting in TYWKWDBI. The best bookmarks are cut-up greeting cards, which have white expanses and the proper stiffness.
Embedded above is a scan of the top portion of a bookmark I recently found in a pocket while doing laundry. And to my dismay I had no idea what book I had been reading at the time, or how long ago. I can still look up words, but how to retrieve the "advice" from some page 61? (I had already decided to skip the "cure for lesbianism" on page 32).
Does anyone want to try to guess the book, based on the words harvested? Answer tomorrow.
Addendum: I could not for the life of me figure out which book I had been reading. So I asked AI:
I immediately remembered the book, which I had read because it was longlisted for the Booker Prize. I had returned it to the library many weeks ago. So I looked at my list of "Books read" and there it was - graded with a "2+" on my personal scale of 0-4.
That rating meant it wasn't worth a potential future reread and not worth reviewing for TYWKIWDBI, so I won't be recommending the book here. I may add attercop, inchwell, swingle scutch, becks, and casemate to my huge list of interesting words (sigil is already there). And I've requested the book from the library again to see whether the "cure for lesbianism" or the "advice" are worth blogging.
I'm posting this now not for the book per se, but to make note of the amazing power of artificial intelligence. I used the commonly-available and free "AI mode" on Google. What amazes me is that it appears that 127 pages of this book have been loaded into a database. So I wondered whether the book could be reproduced by asking the AI to "regurgitate" it passage by passage ("give me a sentence, give me the next sentence etc...). This morning I asked...
That was followed by links (to New Direcrtions Publishing and to Penguin Books Australia) where I could purchase the book. Interestingly there was no link to a third-party seller like Amazon, and (to my disappointment and that of John Farrier) no suggestion that "you can get this book from your local public library."
All of this would seem to be within the boundaries of copyright law, but it still amazes me that a book just published this past year has already been scanned into storage into a massive data warehouse that is guzzling cooling water somewhere in a rural agricultural area.
One day I was musing on the origins of the word "cobweb." I looked it up and found that it comes from "attercop" which is apparently an old word for spider.
ReplyDeleteImmediately Bilbo's taunts to the spiders in Mirkwood suddenly made sense, because he taunts them with "attercop."
I do know some of the other words (wadmal, sigil, becks) but no idea what book they might have come from.
I've first learned of the word Attercop reading The Hobbit, but neither the page at which you found it nor the rest of the words fit. But I clearly remember grabbing my dictionairy - since English is not my first language, and internet was still a long ways away - to see it if was an existing word or yet again one that came from the mind of the author.
ReplyDeleteI was asked why I use decimal points in bookmark notations. That's because these annotations were taken while reading a library book. In my personal books I make tick marks and other notations in the margins, but for library books this method allows me to locate "sigil" 60% down from the top of page 61.
ReplyDeleteGenius.
DeleteAll of this would seem to be within the boundaries of copyright law
ReplyDeleteDoes it? How so?
It means Gemini has a copy of the book in its innards. How is that not an illegal reproduction? Alphabet is profiting of the work of Olga Ravn. Did she agree to them scanning here work? Did she get paid?
When it comes to digital copies, people have been fined for making digital copies of music and movies they *own* on CD or DVD. You're old enough to remember the stern FBI warning at the start of DVDs and VCRs about illegal copies of the movie.
to make note of the amazing power of artificial intelligence
Don't want to be too negative (while acknowledging I am), but this was just a fairly straightforward search assignment. All you need to answer it is a (copyright-infringing?) database of all books every published. Luckily, you didn't search for all books containing "the", "be", "is", "a" and "of".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English
This is extremely cool!
ReplyDelete"Edderkop" is still the Danish words for a spider.
ReplyDelete"From Middle English attercoppe, from Old English ātorcoppe (“spider”), corresponding to atter (“poison, venom”) + cop (“spider”). The latter is still to be found in the English word cobweb. Cognate to Danish edderkop (“spider”) and Norwegian edderkopp (“spider”)."
DeleteI like your decimal points idea!
ReplyDelete