Hah! Just plain geeky fun crazy. What would happen if I tagged this in del.icio.us? asked Kotke in del.icio.us will eat itself.
I won’t give it away, but you have to have some sense of del.geek.i.ness to appreciate it. And it smells like a case of an attempt at recursion without the terminal condition to make it work.
Come to think of, in a chat today with Brian, we were both marveling at how often we reach to Wikipedia for a quick reference check. Look at how rich the info is on the entry for recursion! It is explained via Sponge Bob, a Serpinski triangle, some funkier math logic, and the sublime dictionary definition of recursion.
It is a rich entry, indeed. Would Sponge Bob ever make it in a printed tome?
Even perhaps more noteworthy, is a relative lack of public crying about the “validity” of Wikipedia. is it me? Has it become passé as we now foam over MySpace and YouTube? Was it quietly become valid? Or are more people finding tidbits useful? Is there a bend to the idea of Complete Authoritative Sources to I’ll Comb It and And Questions (okay, that was very highly idealized, pie in the sky, and likely wrong).
But back to del.icio.us will eat itself — this post is one of those gems for those looking at blog styles– clever, understated, under-explained, inquiry driven. There is no user’s guide or list of objectives.
It is a blog post of quirky beauty.
http://cogdogblog.com/2006/11/29/recursion/
1. This is just sick.
2. Sick, sick, sick.
3. Sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick.
4. GOTO 2
As for Wikipedia, there are some loose standards on how to reference it in a serious work, so is it becoming legitimate? Maybe.