Your Daily Dose of Gödel, Escher, Bach: Here’s a scan of the center of the Crab Canon dialogue. Wikipedia says that a crab canon is “a musical term for a kind of canon in which one line is reversed in time from the other (e.g. FABACEAE <=> EAECABAF)”. This being the cleverest book ever, the structure of the dialogue is itself a crab canon: The turning point occurs during the Crab’s interruption, and the lines are palindromically mirrored on each side of the Crab’s monologue.
You want a proof. I guess that means that you want to be more convinced that the Propositional Calculus is consistent than you are convinced of your own sanity. Any proof I could think of would involve mental operations of a greater complexity than anything in the Propositional Calculus itself. So what would it prove? Your desire for a proof of consistency of the Propositional Calculus makes me think of someone who is learning English and insists on being given a dictionary which defines all the simple words in terms of complicated ones…
—
The character of Imprudence in the dialogue between Prudence and Imprudence in Chapter Seven of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach.
This criticism is very spot-on.
In the fourth dialogue of Gödel, Escher, Bach, titled “Contracrostipunctus”, the Tortoise describes how Bach encoded his name B-A-C-H as musical notes in Art of the Fugue but died before finishing the work, leaving the acrostic phrase on the final page of the fugue. Inspired by this, Hofstadter encodes a self-referential double acrostic in the dialogue. The first letters of each turn spell out “Hofstadter’s Contracrostipunctus Acrostically Backwards Spells ‘J. S. Bach’”, and indeed the first letters of each word in the acrostic spell out H-C-A-B-S-J, or “J. S. Bach” spelled backwards.
Most of the clamor,as you certainly know by now, revolves around the age-old usage of the noun “white” and words built from it, such as chairwhite, mailwhite, repairwhite, clergywhite, middlewhite, Frenchwhite, forewhite, whitepower, whiteslaughter, oneupuwhiteship, straw white, whitehandle, and so on. The negrists claim that using the word “white,” either on its own or as a component, to talk about all the members of the human species is somehow degrading to blacks and reinforces racism. Therefore the libbers propose that we substitute “person” everywhere where “white” now occurs. Sensitive speakers of our secretary tongue of course find this preposterous. There is great beauty to a phrase such as “All whites are created equal.” Our forebosses who framed the Declaration of Independence well understood the poetry of our language. Think how ugly it would be to say “All persons are created equal,” or “All whites and blacks are created equal.” Besides, as any schoolwhitey can tell you, such phrases are redundant. In most contexts, it is self-evident when “white” is being used in an inclusive sense, in which case it subsumes members of the darker race just as much as fairskins.
Ambigram by Douglas Hofstadter (via Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
