Post post commentary

Today’s post is a commentary on yesterday’s post. You might say it is a post post commentary.

In my previous post I pointed out that a stereogram provides a taste of what virtual reality might be like. Yet it is not actually a form of virtual reality, as we generally understand that term today.

In a sense, a stereogram is a simulacrum of virtual reality. That makes it a virtual virtual reality.

Which reminds me of the way Amazon describes its Mechanical Turk system, a marketplace where real people simulate the work of computers. Amazon refers to this process as artificial artificial intelligence.

We can go further with this theme. Rosie M Banks was a fictional author who appeared in the books of P.G. Wodehouse. Rosie wrote romance novels with titles like Only a Factory Girl. Which makes Only a Factory Girl a fictional fictional book.

Speaking of fiction, in an imaginary story by Kurt Vonnegut’s beloved terrible science fiction author Kilgore Trout, there was a character named Albert Hardy. This would make Hardy a imaginary imaginary character.

Similarly, consider the tale of the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Gryphon is an actual mythical creature, with a pedigree dating back to the ancient Greeks.

In contrast, his companion the Mock Turtle isn’t a real mythical creature at all. Carroll simply borrowed the words from mock turtle soup. So you could say that the Mock Turtle is a mythical mythical creature.

Speaking of exotic creatures, at some point scientists came to believe that the Brontosaurus had never really existed. According to prevalent scientific opinion, the mighty thunder lizard was just a variant of Apatosaurus.

Fortunately in the last few years the prevailing scientific consensus has evolved. The extinction of genus Brontosaurus is now extinct. The Brontosaurus, I am happy to report, is no longer an extinct extinct dinosaur.

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