Open Discussion

[dariusk]

This is for discussion of non-technical things related to this project (such as suggestions for project organization).

[dariusk]

Okay @erkyrath -- I added some labels and there is now this new thread for non-resource-related discussion.

[catseye]

Not sure if this is the absolute best place to post ideas one has that one is not planning to use themselves, but:

I believe I heard this idea on a terrible 80's sitcom called Head of the Class. One of the life aspirations of one of the characters was to write a novel, of some great length (I do not recall if it was 50K words, but we can pretend that it was), that was one long palindrome.

I know nothing about computer-generating palindromes, but finding a 50K-word palindrome does sound like a task well-suited to a computer.

[dariusk]

Paging @nickmontfort, since someone just said "palindrome"

[nickmontfort]

With William Gillespie, I wrote (manually, but with computer assistance in, for instance, validation) a 2002-word palindrome in 2001 -- published initially on New Year's Day 2002. This was 2002: A Palindrome Story.

Soon after, Peter Norvig (who is at Google and has access to more data than any of us) wrote some code to create a long palindrome: http://grandtextauto.org/2004/06/25/worlds-longest-palindrome/

It's a fine hack, but it isn't really coherent, even when compared to 2002, which few people appreciated.

Anyway, I would suggest that a good 50,000-word palindrome could be obtained by generating an extended version of "The Utterance of the Petulant Child," linked from the Grand Text Auto blog post above.

[catseye]

cant breathe

OK, better.

I see you are not one to shy away from making evil suggestions, stranger. They told me of the wicked ways of the residents of NaNoGenMo, they did, back at the ranch, but I didn't believe them. Lucky for you, I'm not one to shy away from taking such evil suggestions. viz., #58

(NaNoGenMo: not good for the breathing. Not good for the avoiding the evil suggestions, neither.)

[MichaelPaulukonis]

How do we submit our code, other than by linking?

Should we submit as pull-requests, with a new folder-of-whatever containing our whatever-thing-we-do-did?

If pull-requests were requested early and often and merged early and often we could have one forkful of nanogenmo to swallow.

[dariusk]

@MichaelPaulukonis Code should not go in this repo -- simply post it elsewhere (on Github or wherever) and link it from your issue.

[dariusk]

We got some nice coverage on Dazed & Confused, which I think means we're officially sexy now.

[dariusk]

More media coverage, this time in The Stranger!