Subject: Oblique Strategies

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 18:48:24 -0400 (EDT)

I have for many years been fond of Brian Eno's list of Oblique Strategies.
Essentially, they are meant to be used to escape from creative blocks
(writers', programmers', what have you). You randomly choose one of
about a hundred sayings chosen by Eno and see how they apply to your
situation. The strategies were originally placed on cards similar to
playing cards, and are now available in various places around the net.

Today I discovered the Oblique Strategies web site at
http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies . This provides a history of
the four editions of the Strategies (the one I knew was the second).
The fourth edition was not sold, but was commissioned by Peter Norton
for distribution to his friends. Eno wrote the strategies in English,
but Norton decided to have the cards translated into several languages,
with the following *interesting* comments:

After a little research, I
discovered that the half- dozen most widely spoken
languages, together, were known to more than half of the
world's population. (It's interesting to try to guess what
these languages are; the mistakes in our guessing tell us a
lot about our cultural and geographic myopia. The top
half-dozen languages: Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi,
Spanish, Russian and Arabic. Among people I've talked
to, most of their missed guesses appear in the second
half-dozen: Japanese, French, German, Portuguese,
Bengali, and Malay. Score six for Europe, five for Asia --
including two in India; and Malay which almost no
Westerner would guess -- and one for Arabia. None for
highly balkanized Africa.) 

It seems to me that the source of this listing has to be Lojban,
since the exact order of languages depends on what your source is
and how you count 2nd-language speakers (we reckon them as half
a speaker). The grouping into Top Six and Second Six is also
plainly Lojbanic: TLI Loglan has a Top Eight instead.

If anyone feels like translating the Strategies into Lojban,
the raw text is available at http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/Ed4.html .

-- 
John Cowan [email-masked]
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
--Douglas Hofstadter