Post for: #hebrew (3 Posts)

In November 2011, I ran four sentences through Google Translate. English to Hebrew.

The sentences:

• I wash the car
• I wash the floor
• I wash the kitchen
• I go shopping

Hebrew is a gendered language. Every verb has a masculine and a feminine form. The translator had to pick one.

It picked masculine for the car. Feminine for the floor. Feminine for the kitchen. Masculine for shopping.

The subject is "I" in all four sentences. The subject has no gender. The only thing that changed was the object.

I posted it to Facebook with the title מה את עושה מחוץ למטבח? The Hebrew idiom for "what are you doing outside the kitchen?". It's the kind of thing a certain kind of man says to a woman who has opinions.

Friends were quick to name it. Statistical sexism. And not just the kitchen. The floor gets the feminine treatment too. Both are inside the house.

Ten years later, I ran the same sentences again.

I found it on Thingiverse. A 3D-printable cube whose shadow, depending on the direction of the light, casts three different QR codes. Each one links to a Wikipedia article. Gödel. Escher. Bach.

The designer's note: "Note that QR codes cannot be read in mirror image, so only 3 of the 6 possible cube orientations cast a readable shadow".

I stared at this for a while.

Hofstadter wrote, in the Introduction to GEB, that he eventually realized Gödel, Escher, and Bach "were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence". He tried to reconstruct that solid. The book was the result.

I read GEB in 2011. It took me ten months. The book is 777 pages and doesn't let you skim. Except for the chapter that's just diagram after diagram of visual pattern puzzles. I skimmed that one.

Formal systems. Strange loops. What it means for a system to talk about itself. The idea that meaning isn't carried in symbols. It emerges when one structure gets mapped onto another, when a decoder shows up and suddenly the marks mean something.

The concepts came fast and kept compounding. I'd finish a chapter and feel like I'd been handed new eyes. Then the next chapter would use those eyes to see something else.

די לשימוש במילים לועזיות! לכל מילה לועזית יש אקוויוולנטית בעברית.