[HN Gopher] Eight Million Copies of Moby-Dick (2014)
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       Eight Million Copies of Moby-Dick (2014)
        
       Author : awalias
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2025-10-23 01:38 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thevoltablog.wordpress.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thevoltablog.wordpress.com)
        
       | hiccuphippo wrote:
       | Maybe use ffmpeg to convert the pages into a video to see if
       | anything changes?
        
         | egypturnash wrote:
         | Just load it into a pdf viewer, set it to display single pages
         | with no scrolling, and hit the "next page" key.
        
         | kibwen wrote:
         | Seven days later they find your dead body in front of the
         | television, sopping wet and inexplicably flat.
        
       | soupfordummies wrote:
       | well this is an interesting rabbit hole!
        
       | morellt wrote:
       | I think i figured it out. 1000 pages of images with 40 rows and
       | 200 columns of the repeating pattern of three dark squares with
       | one light square vertically oriented. 1000x40x200 is 8,000,000. I
       | think those slivers are the cover of the Moby Dick it parodies,
       | with each cover overlaid on the last, and the resolution
       | absolutely destroyed to save storage space.
        
       | williamDafoe wrote:
       | I have a feeling the author compressed 8 million copies of Moby
       | Dick with LZW compression using a huge token cache, then printed
       | the binary results in a 1000-page book. Each successive copy
       | would become smaller and smaller.
        
       | dr0p wrote:
       | that's a lot of Moby dick(s)
        
         | nocoiner wrote:
         | Mobies Dick.
        
       | Finnucane wrote:
       | Long ago when reading slush for a NY publisher, I opened a
       | package to find a 'manuscript' purporting to prove that the real
       | value of pi was 22/7. 22/7 is a repeating decimal, which was
       | typed out at length to cover one page. That page was then
       | duplicated, at smaller sizes, until there was a page that was
       | just covered in unreadable rectangular blocks. Then the page of
       | unreadable blocks was copied for another 700 pages, and bound in
       | stiff boards. The effect of flipping through it was much the same
       | as described here, with the additional undertone of insanity.
        
       | yazantapuz wrote:
       | For some reason, it remained me of Borges' Pierre Menard, Author
       | of the Quixote:
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-27 23:01 UTC)