Geek Ruby Poetry

From dougpete's delicious feed comes the 99 Bottles of Beer site. The site features the code to produce the lyrics in 1264 different programming languages and variations.

One that caught my eye was Ruby.



One commenter wrote:

This may not be the shortest and most efficient version, but it's definitely the version that was the most fun to read.
Especially the parts "wall.call" if you need the next bottle, "step = method :buy" if you have no beer left and "beer.drink" as what to do in each stanza.

I would actually call it a geek poem.

For those of you who don't code Ruby: Learn Ruby, so you can enjoy reading this poem and writing your next scripts/applications/whatever.

There are "poems" written in Actionscript, Pascal, Turing, APL and lots more.

Poetry is a bit of an unintentional recurring theme in this blog. There certainly are times when programming feels elegant and creative and expressive. It certainly has plenty of rules that constrain - syntax, keywords, etc. Maybe it is like Haiku on a grand scale!

Happy V-D!

Here is a Valentine's gift for that someone 'special'.



Thanks to Kaz for alerting me to this and for his contribution to the book:



How would you represent the pain of moving ego to zero, though?

Mathematical Poetry?

This is not as deep as Kaz's stuff, but comes from Harold and Kumar by way of the College Math Teacher,

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed

I probably should have saved that for Valentine's Day, but I have something else up my sleeve for that.

Once again mathematical proficiency is associated with embarrassing lameness - sigh.

Minimizing Ridicule

Another fine post at Presentation Zen led me to this interesting quadratic relationship from the Indexed blog. There is something here akin to the Mathematical Poetry that I wrote about previously. Can you imagine asking students to create graphs like these?

The poetry of presentation

If you drilled down at the Presentation Zen blog to the entry on the art of repetition, you might have watched Barack Obama's "concession" speech in New Hampshire, embedded here. My thirteen year-old was captivated by it.



Now, this morning on Larry Lessig's blog, which has been full of pro-Obama messages of late, we have this incredible remixing of that poetic speech into an inspirational music video. Not an example of the culture of amateurs, but still a powerful example of the power of words and imagination to inspire and convict.

Mathematical Poetry Blog

I set up a RSS feed, using blogsearch.google.com, of new pages that reference The Geometer's Sketchpad. The first useful result is from a blog about Mathematical Poetry. The blog is featuring artistic works currently and mentions one mathematical artist's use of Sketchpad.

Here is one fascinating example of Mathematical Poetry from an earlier post: