On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:38:37 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:

> In article <475f8973$1@news.povray.org>, nos### [at] nospamcom says...
>> On Sun, 09 Dec 2007 21:20:00 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> 
>> > So, the questions really are: 1. Does it have to be human readable?
>> 
>> That would be a "watch" by definition.  The usage that I have seen this
>> is in the context of the book "The Invisible Watchmaker", and the
>> premise (at least from the debates I've had with people who have read
>> it; I have not) seems to be flawed as the idea is that a watch has to
>> imply a watchmaker because a watch must be made by a maker.  Therefore,
>> there must be a watchmaker or there'd be no watch.
>> 
> Actually, it just implies that a maker can sometimes come up with things
> that "personally" benefit him/her/it-self, which wouldn't otherwise
> result. The reason I said "human readable" is precisely because of that
> basic conceit, that because its useful to them in some fashion, and its
> too complicated for them to bother (not attempt, just bother) to figure
> out, this implies that a maker had to do it. My point was that you could
> decide that some flower, which had the odd tendency of gripping your
> wrist, would look nice to wear, and never realize that it was so synced
> to the 24 hour cycle of the planet that it also did something that made
> it 100% like a watch. Or maybe there could be a leech that when through
> clear 24 hour cycles, which only appear in its *chemistry*, in which
> case you would still be wearing a good watch, you just wouldn't be able
> to read it at all. And so on. The initial presumption is that you would
> *recognize* it as a watch in the first place. I.e., that it would
> display the information in a way that the moron looking for a watch
> would "recognize" as watch like.

My understanding of the book is that it is dealing specifically with a 
mechanical or electronic watch, not with something watch-like or that 
keeps time....

Jim

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