Borges on Chaos Theory
aethermug.com
aethermug.com
Might? Run a simulation. Absent restoring forces, they do grow.
Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος
But also of clean-room implementations; as if Don Quixote represents an idea and in implementation of that idea one must inevitably duplicate some small part of someone else's independent implementation.
I doubt we need to go all the way to physicists and mathematicians.
> ...Menard invented a whole new way to read, one where you deliberately imagine the text as written at a different time and by a different author, leading to radically different interpretations of the original text.
A simpler explanation is that Borges had some experience (don't we all?) with partisans, reviewers, and even scholars, who seem wilfully to imagine their chosen text as written at a different time and by a different author than it had been.
[Given the nice discussion in TFA of changing connotations of symbols: are there genres beyond Country&Western where the chorus stays syntactically the same but semantically changes after intervening verses? My current goto example is Husky's "I only Roll 'Em", where the title is indeed the first line of the chorus, but the listener's interpretation of "roll" and "them" changes over ~150 seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK9nx7e9IGM ]
I don't think this does the Menard story justice (although I'm not sure I buy the interpretation you're critiquing either)
You're on the right lines but you paint it as some kind of irritated put down of bad interpretations. I think Borges trying to probe (in a witty and playful way) the thing that we all do when when we attempt to read something from another time or place. He's not particularly passing judgement as I don't think he is claiming there's an easy way round the problems.
EDIT - I've just done the thing I hate other people doing - replying to a comment without reading TFA properly. I'll remedy this but I want my reply to stand because I disagree with your characterisation and it's currently the top comment.
OK, fair enough — I think I was opposing TFA too strongly, and prefer your interpretation overall!
(although I'd like to believe I try to meet authors halfway, and try to meet their manifold at a tangent [or a least a secant which makes a reasonable approximation]).
"The House of Asterion" would beg to differ.
The OP uses the Italian fascism symbol. Hitler's appropriation of the symbol for the sun - taken from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism (and apparently in some places in Africa, too) - can also be used to explain it: it has forever changed the _associative meaning_ of it - and now the symbol (legally banned in Germany outside of historic educational/research context) evokes images not of sun workship, but of the worst evils committed by mankind: gas chambers with scratch marks of human fingernail, human skin turned into lamp shades and piles of starved bodies, tens of millions dead one way or another (holocaust and WWII). That history leaves a sad, repulsive, shocking and painful memory imprinted on one's brain (assuming one has some empathy and conscience), and seeing the symbol in the 19th century would be quite difference in comparison; this memory association cannot be "un-thought" (and as moral obligation, shouldn't!).
On a related note, looking at the European elections, it is shameful and beyond believe that some want to turn back the clock (actual fascists) or to protest-vote like the folks did in the 1930s (coward followers).
Leech, Geoffrey N. (1981) _Semantics: The Study of Meaning_ (2nd ed.), London: Penguin).
a human skin lampshade was reported to have been displayed by Buchenwald concentration camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch and his wife Ilse Koch, along with other human skin artifacts.[2][3][4] Despite myths to the contrary, there were no systematic efforts by the Nazis to make human skin lampshades.[5]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampshades_made_from_human_ski...
>soap made from human corpses
The Yad Vashem Memorial has stated that the Nazis did not produce soap with fat which was extracted from Jewish corpses on an industrial scale
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_made_from_human_corpses
The German Corpse Factory or Kadaververwertungsanstalt (literally "Carcass-Utilization Factory"), also sometimes called the "German Corpse-Rendering Works" or "Tallow Factory"[1] was one of the most notorious anti-German atrocity propaganda stories circulated in World War I. In the postwar years, investigations in Britain and France revealed that these stories were false.
[...]
Rumours that the Germans used the bodies of their soldiers to create fat appear to have been circulating by 1915. Cynthia Asquith noted in her diary on 16 June 1915: “We discussed the rumour that the Germans utilise even their corpses by converting them into glycerine with the by-product of soap.”[7] Such stories also appeared in the American press in 1915 and 1916.[7] The French press also took it up in Le Gaulois, in February, 1916.
This is horseshit. Even the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem says that concentration camp lampshades made of human skin were probably myth. The one extant example was tested in 2012, seems it's just cow leather.
Truth matters, and such fabrications do a disservice to the victims of the horrors which did transpire.