[HN Gopher] My Life in Ambigrammia
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       My Life in Ambigrammia
        
       https://archive.ph/SFi0a
        
       Author : fortran77
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2025-10-06 20:07 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Recent and related:
       | 
       |  _Ambigr.am_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45478780 -
       | Oct 2025 (40 comments)
        
       | d--b wrote:
       | note the author is Douglas Hofstadter who wrote Godel Escher Bach
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
        
         | Nifty3929 wrote:
         | Such a great book! I feel like skimming through it again now,
         | to remind myself exactly how Godel's argument worked.
        
         | jjcc wrote:
         | Exactly. Along with a few other books.
        
       | kragen wrote:
       | It's exciting to see that a new Hofstadter book is out!
       | 
       | With respect to bringing beauty into the world in dark times,
       | it's always worth remembering Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C
       | Major, Op. 60, "Leningrad", composed in Leningrad during its
       | 900-day siege by the Nazis, and first performed there later that
       | year, with some of the musicians fainting from starvation:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOkBEqtGUI8
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_(Shostakovich)
       | 
       | -- *** --
       | 
       | In case there are other Hofstadter letterform fans here, last
       | year I tracked down the "gridfonts" repository his research group
       | had put together as part of their work on "letter spirit" last
       | millennium, at https://wayback.archive-
       | it.org/219/20060606215909/http://www.... There were 287 gridfonts
       | in it. I reverse-engineered the file format (before finding the
       | Scheme code that decoded it), hacked together a Python 3 script
       | http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gridfontparse.py to convert
       | it to PostScript, and produced this PDF with all the gridfonts:
       | http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/all-gridfonts.pdf
       | 
       | I think I may have been the first person to see some of these
       | fonts in 20 years. But, apparently, there were hundreds more.
       | 
       | Letterforms aren't copyrightable under US law, where the file in
       | question was initially published, but outline font files are
       | because they are "computer programs". Gridfont letters are 56-bit
       | bitmaps indicating which segments are turned on or off, which to
       | me are obviously not computer programs. Nobody that I know of has
       | ever litigated over letterforms like these:
       | font : benzene right         creator : doug         create date :
       | Tue Feb 19 15:39:48 EST 1991         last edit : feb 24 94
       | a 058002400B0000         b 04824B00090000         c
       | 04800100090000
       | 
       | so I don't think their copyright status has ever been decided.
       | So, if you decide to use these in your product logo or something,
       | there's no guarantee you won't lose a lawsuit to Hofstadter (or
       | his estate, or Indiana University). Don't say I didn't warn you.
       | 
       | That said, that wasn't the motivation for creating them, so I
       | think the risk is fairly small.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-10-06 23:00 UTC)