Google shows her quotes ALL over the web. But it does not (within my googling ability anyway) give a hint who or where she actually is. Since PG has her quotes on his website, I hoped it would be alright to ask here.
I should add that the first person to catch this was a guy called John Baldwin, who sent me an email about it in May 2008, but who agreed to keep it quiet.
Too late for that. But it wasn't really a social experiment. I just wanted to say something that was only one sentence, and this seemed the most convenient way.
More likely a way to get around the social stigma attached to quoting yourself.
If he put the same quote up, and attributed it to himself, people would pay less attention to the message and spend more time dealing with their feelings regarding this stigma.
Thankfully now we have Twitter, which is an acceptable medium to post witty things you come up with, and these witticisms are by default attributed to you.
Only if everyone reading this thread commits to a vow of silence and in return pg (or should I say Tara?) agrees to take care of our children after we die.
I think quoting oneself is like talking about oneself in the third person... it's socially awkward.
Also the basic format of a quotation
"words words words" - attribution
is like using bold/italics/underline all at once... conveying to the reader that you think this point is super critical/insightful. If you walked up to someone and said "listen to what I'm about to say because it's really insightful", I suspect it'd provoke the same reaction as quoting yourself in writing does.
Unfortunately, if you just write the one line you want to say, without acting like it's a quote at all, you have to rely on someone else to add the bold/italics/underline and pass it on. Also, it'd really stand out on your quotes page, not being in quotation marks and all. ;)
The best way to have something named after yourself is to go with a really generic name (such as "automatic machine.") Then, people discussing your idea will often attach your name to it so that they can discuss it unambiguously. That's why they call it a Turing Machine, although Turing himself never did.
Yes, but I have a strange ability to see certain patterns in data very quickly. I almost instantly saw without thinking that it contained Paul Graham.
This ability manifests itself on a daily basis in one useful fashion. I can look at an entire screen of text (say a log file) and almost immediately take the whole thing in and spot something 'odd' or 'interesting' to examine.
Drives me nuts watching people using computers though. I can find the button or icon they are slowly searching for in a flash.
Up till now I'm the only one I know who was like that. But mine only works for proofreading -- and it seems to be declining with age :-( I used to be able to glance at a page and immediately get a feeling that "something is wrong." Then when looking more carefully I can see the misspelled words.
If possible, please answer the questions I posted alongside your post as well. This is very interesting :-)
As an aside, spotting spelling errors is not the same process as solving anagrams. Did you decrypt the anagram in the OP instantly as well? I would consider these two different things.
That happens to me too. It's actually annoying. If I could dedicate the mental effort I unavoidably spend on background spell- and grammar-checking to something useful, I'd be a freaking genius.
I don't play puzzles much, but anagrams are usually easy. It doesn't seem to work as well with pictures. I don't know what "where's waldo" is.
Words to me often look like what they mean. My favorite example is "eager." It just looks like it's barely restrained, waiting to leap forward: a kind of "visual onomatopoeia" I guess. I used to think everyone was like this when I was a kid, but asking a few people about it soon pointed out that I was just a weirdo :-)
I think the reason it's declined with age is that as a child I read constantly - I always had my nose in a book - so words became associated with mental pictures. As an adult I read much less.
From his description I doubt it's synaesthesia. Usually it's a crossover in a fundamental perception (taste, smell, etc.), rather than an elaborate sensation "feeling as if it is jumping out." Also, it varies per-individual, suggesting that "eager" could have just as well seemed to, for example, "a monster that eats everything in its path."
My feeling is this is just a very strong "coupling" of vocabulary to the emotional centers. Fast activation, in other words. If this is the case, I also suspect it wouldn't correlate very much to anagram-solving ability.
Would you mind looking at the questions I raised for the OP?
I heard a story about one of the pioneers in genetics around Watson's time; a woman, forgot her name, who once walked into a room where two researchers (also forgot name) were building a physical model of the double helix. It was at least a couple thousand plastic molecules. She took a look, said that there was one mistake, and turned around and left.
After studying the brain for years I still can't tell why this happens.
You're right. It's strange to find her quotes in so many places without any biographical information. Now I'm curious too. Combined with the fact that my googling pride has been hurt.
