Lewis Carroll

There are a number of tasks authors writing speculative fiction perform that offer us readers a handle on the “extent” of their creativity. By a wide margin my favourite example has got to be Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry. Jabberwocky is, for me, a highlight of Carroll’s creative instinct. …

It’s well known that Lewis Carroll, in addition to being the author of the peerless Alice books and Hunting of the Snark, was an academic mathematician with a special interest in logic. Here’s what the Encyclopedia Britannica says (in its entry on ‘Logic’): The contributions of Lewis Carroll (Charles L…

I The Lad and the Jabberwock went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took two toves, and some borogroves, To gimble their gyre afloat. The Lad looked up at the beast in shock, And flourished his scimitar, “O frightful Jabber! O Jabber, my wock, What a horrible Jabber you are, You…

Back in college in the early 1990s, I used to struggle with mathematics phobia. (Even now, to be honest, I do not enjoy studying most topics in mathematics, with the possible exceptions of set theory and category theory— this is especially true of applied mathematics.) Generally speaking, although one intelligence…

Like many people, I spend a lot of time working on my prompts for Stable Diffusion to get exactly the right tokens in exactly the right order. But what happens if you present an AI art generator with… well, nonsense? I could just have typed in random words — or…