5th Week; WHY I HATE WIKIPEDIA

At the beginning of the lecture we viewed some Wikipedia sites. It is obvious that is not a reliable source as anyone can log in and change or add information. You can view the history of a page, and this shows how many changes have occurred since the site was created. Wikipedia isn’t necessarily useless, as it does contain a lot of information, however it shouldn’t be used as a primary resource when researching.

Matrix Problem; how can we be sure that what we’re reading is the truth?
‘There are facts that we absolutely know are true e.g. it’s raining, and then there are other facts that we can’t always be sure’.

In the lecture we also discussed searching reliable information. Library Catalogue Journals are a good source of information, found on the Griffith site.
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Reading for the week Jorge Luis Borges.
1940, short story, Tale.
Presented in English & Spanish.
Searching for the truth about Uqbar.

Notes taken…

• Volume XLVI of the Angelo-American Cyclopaedia, instead of 917, it concealed 921 pages. These fourteen additional pages made up the article of Uqbar. (not in alphabetical marking).
• The passage recalled by Bioy was perhaps the only surprising one,
  For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.
  The rest of it seemed very plausible, quite in keeping with the general tone of the work and (as is natural) a bit boring.
• Reading over it again they realized that amongst the fourteen names which figured in the geographical part, they only recognized three - Khorasan, Armenia, Erzerum.
• A friend Herbet Ashe died, leaving behind a certified package from Brazil. It contained ‘not the story of my emotions but of Uqbar and Tlön and Orbis Tertius’

On Tuesday, X crosses a deserted road and loses nine copper coins. On Thursday, Y finds in the road four coins, somewhat rusted by Wednesday's rain. On Friday, Z discovers three coins in the road. On Friday morning, X finds two coins in the corridor of his house. The heresiarch would deduce from this story the reality - i.e., the continuity - of the nine coins which were recovered. It is absurd (he affirmed) to imagine that four of the coins have not existed between Tuesday and Thursday, three between Tuesday and Friday afternoon, two between Tuesday and Friday morning. It is logical to think that they have existed - at least in some secret way, hidden from the comprehension of men - at every moment of those three periods.

• Equality is one thing and identity another. They then argued: if equality implies identity, one would also have to admit that the nine coins are one
  
• Books were not signed. Plagiarism did not exist, it was established that all works were from one author. Often critics invented authors.
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Tutorial:
I couldn’t make it to the first half of the lecture so I missed all discussion at the beginning, however the time I did spend in class I started work on the tutorial task about Walter Benjamin. The class also had to choose what our assignment for the end of the semester was going to focus on.