> Jambunathan's mention of Tamil brought to mind a picture that > I had seen long ago and found mysterious, beautiful and fascinating. > It is Fig. 40, p. 168, in Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach": I looked > for a copy on the web, but I only found the complete book. > > The picture is a collage of scripts, from the undeciphered (at least > in 1980, the time of publication) script of Easter Island to Tamil > to Assyrian cuneiform.
Book seems like an interesting read. For me to go from frame message -> outer message -> inner message, I think I need to read the whole book and not just a fragment of it :-) Just curious, is the book a standard regular or supplementary reading for courses in US. If yes, courses here could improve a lot. Such readings will make CS/Mathematics fun, fascinating and mysterious. > I have no idea what each snippet says - yet there are people around > today (and in some cases, perhaps, there *were* people some time ago, > but no longer) who can (or could) extract meaning from each of these > snippets. Conversely, there are scripts that I can extract meaning from, > that other people find mysterious. I can't help the feeling that there > is something deep going on here, I just don't know *what*! > > Nick --
