27 Nivôse CCXII (January 16, 2004)
Fruit Flies Like A Banana
I forgot about this thing, and then Linda got an iMac. All of a sudden I had a mission: get my uptime script working on MacOS X.
Well, after a little bit of tinkering and figuring out some unique Darwin file names (i.e. vm_stat instead of vmstat), I am pleased to announce that Chaos-Control 0.2alpha (yes, it's still alpha) now includes semi-confirmed support for Darwin alongside the previous Linux and Solaris support. Not that anybody uses it besides me, but I still felt like announcing that.
Today's title: Difficulty: Marx Brothers. Value: One point.
I'm not sure where exactly the title comes from, not can I explain its significance to the post. However, the sentence can be parsed two different ways:
Fruit (ADJ) flies (NOUN-SUB) like (VERB) a banana (NOUN-OBJ).
Fruit (NOUN-SUB) flies (VERB) like a banana (PREP-PHRASE).
A third parsing:
Fruit (VERB) flies (NOUN-OBJ) like a banana (PREP-PHRASE).
But that one doesn't make much sense, because "fruit" isn't a recognized verb. I prefer the sentence "Time flies like an arrow" because then the third parsing works better.
It's because of ambiguities like these that make language parsing by computers difficult.
Actually, I'm going to be nice and give you the point, Peter.
It's a Groucho Marx quote that goes "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." (The significance being that it was the only time related quote I could think of.)
I don't remember which movie it's from though.
Posted by g026r at 27 Nivôse CCXII 13:10 (2004/01/16)
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