Mapping Hacks

by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh

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when is the next where…

November 29th, 2006 by Rich

I’ve been running around saying ‘when is the next where’ for a bit now.     I sort of assumed it was an established meme that I was jumping on the back of, looking for uh, seconds…but a glance at Google finds zero hits for “when is the next where,” and a grep of the #geo log shows only one use, my own, on Aug 1 of this year, at 16:00.

I am doing various hopefully clever projects right now…I need to warp one so that the motto can be ‘foobar corp, because when is the next where’

Because, after all, I’m interested in communicating with that subset of a subset of  geeks who actually care about both time and space.

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One Response to “when is the next where…”

  1. Classilog Says:
    December 13th, 2006 at 8:03 pm

    The shape of the sentence is obviously meant to mimic “Grey is the next green”. Wittgenstein might have suggested that colour names are of the same category and therefore “Grey is the next green” makes some sense, but “when” and “where” are mixing two different categories, time and space. “When is the next where” is grammatically correct, but semantically senseless. (For another fun example of grammatically correct, semantically senseless phrases, see “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.)

    To try to see if it makes sense, try being more specific as in “2007 is the next when” makes some sense, although I don’t know why I’d want to say it. “New York is the next where” makes some sense, but “2007 is the next New York” makes no sense at all. (It’s a stretch, but “20007 [taken as a postal zip code] is the next New York” could make some sense.)

    Someone may wish to argue, however, that time and space are both in the same category, namely, ‘dimension’. That would be pushing common sense, but a scientist might be able to make sense of it. Anyway, I have my own meme to push. “How is the next what.”

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