Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Holy Unexpected Truths, Batman!

So I read somewhere that if you click the first link in a Wikipedia article that is not in parenthesis or italics, and then repeat this, you will eventually land on the article for philosophy.

I tried it out with the word "Stargate" (since I kinda liked that show and everything related to it), and followed this chain of links:

Stargate
Military science fiction
Genre
Literature
Latin
Italic languages
Indo-European languages
Language family
Language
Communication
Meaning (philosophy of language)
Philosophy

Say what?! Not only did it lead to the article on philosophy, but it did so rather quickly, in my opinion. So I then tried it with a physical science, figuring it couldn't reasonably lead back to philosophy:

Volcanism
Volcanoes
Rupture (this lead to "ductile fracture" under ...)
Fracture
Stress (mechanics)
Continuum mechanics
Mechanics
Physics
Natural science
Science
Knowledge
Facts
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy

Okay, by this time I was annoyed, because there had to be something that didn't relate. So then I tried it again with something I figured would have no possible chance of leading in that direction:

Lady Gaga
Stage name
Pseudonym
Name
Noun
Linguistics
Science
Latin
Italic languages
Indo-European languages
Language family
Language
Communication
Meaning (philosophy of language)
Philosophy

Not only did it get there, but it got there faster with Lady Gaga than it did for volcanism! Truly amazing. I'm sure there are other things you could check, but with 3 data points that uphold it, I'm satisfied that this theory holds ... for now.

How about you?

1 comment:

Melody said...

16 steps from art to philosophy

Click here to see the full blog.