The Space Needle is My Neighbor

EIGHT YEARS AND COUNTING What Have We Learned So Far?
"A mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Thursday, June 29, 2006

Babel Fish vs God


I've been trying to find a Latin translation of the word grandmother for a couple of weeks. My quest sprang from a conversation with B, concerning how one would describe an 'avuncular grandma'. (I think you had to be there to understand......)
My last resort was Babel Fish, the online translation tool. Alas, no Latin, but I did discover what a Babel fish was. My ignorance in this area stems from the fact that although I spent many years in the book business, I never read any Douglas Adams. Blame it on a generalized suspicion of any book that becomes too popular, I suppose. I finally saw a few scenes from the movie a couple of months ago, but the Babel fish part apparently escaped me at the time. I decided to investigate a bit and here's what I came up with:

“The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”

This was a useful plot device for Adams, as it allowed various alien races to communicate while speaking different languages. Adams wrote that the idea that all aliens would speak English was to him, very strange.

The Babel fish triggered a joke about the existence of God:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. Q.E.D."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
" That was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

In the dvd of the movie, this scene was placed in the "Deleted Scenes" section. Too bad. I think it would have gotten a huge laugh.

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