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Absolutely! The "right answer" for best *intelligent* compression would only store a *minimal* set of pertinent data points and then would use intellect to flesh out the details on decompression. Although you could end up with http://www.reducedshakespeare.com/, I'll worry that when some AI researcher starts down this path

Minor disagreement with what you said... The details are relevant; they just aren't important enough to store in and of themselves. Sort of like mathematics where you only need to learn the principle (pertinent data) and how to apply it. Then every example is just a specific case (flesh out the details).

It takes real intelligence to know which priciple to apply or that none apply and you're doing real research. Genius is being able to find such a solution where none existed before. The details are relevant but just not important enough to bother storing since they can be reasonably recreated by applying real inteligence. So, real intelligent compression would mean that different people decompressing the same article at different times would *not* get the same text but enough of the pertinent data would be the same that they all come away from reading the article with the same meaning. That would be real intelligent compression and decompression.

Cheers,
Dave

condensing things like this for humor

Exactly. A classic example of this is the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which does plays like The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). They fit all of Shakespeare's plays into a single hour and a half work. They also do things like the "Complete History of America (Abridged)", "The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged)", and "All The Great Books (Abridged)" (wherein they cover 83 major pieces of western literature). A bit more info here.

Not quite. But 2 guys doing the Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Bible, The Complete History of America etc. are pretty impressive. I saw them do the Shakspeare one a few years back - very funny.

They concentrate entirely on Hamlet in Act 2, leaving all the other works to be performed in Act 1.

Though technically, it's a company and not just one dude, The Reduced Shakespeare Company is pretty good at this sort of thing, too. By all means, if you get a chance to see them, do so. All 37 plays in 97 minutes, not bad!

Evil Dead, by The Reduced Shakespeare Company

Do the three movies in 10 minutes? These guys could.

p.s. the Will Smith idea would be a Hollywood darling, but only if you included Martin Lawrence... ouch. The new tagline: "You so evil!"

Or if you don't have the time to see the full set of DVDs you can try these guys. All 37 plays in 97 minutes and funny as hell.

Tallahassee gets 77% more rain each year than Seattle, on average (I used wunderground.com to look this up). I'm glad Tallahassee doesn't have bridges, otherwise people would be jumping off of them. :^)

So why do you think that west coast people suck? I guess I'm curious about this point because I took a road trip out to California and back last summer, and I didn't really encounter any "meanies" along the way... I'd say the worst I encountered out there was one lady who cut me off somewhere around Modesto, CA, but that could have happened anywhere. People were more to-the-point and didn't coat their conversations with sugar, but that seemed to be the most of it. Somewhere around Bakersfield, CA, I helped one guy start up his ailing '75 VW Bug, and he and his wife sincerely thanked me for the effort. San Francisco was the only major city we visited out of our 6,000 mile trip where we could cross streets and the cars would actually yield to us without honking or otherwise getting mad.

I'm also unsure about your statement about organic vs. planning in cities... If S.F. has improved its livability because its changes aren't so organic anymore, why do you say that the more planning that goes into cities, the more it dies? Perhaps I'm not interpreting right...

Besides the planned vs. organic sides of the argument, I personally believe that there is a certain level of enthusiasm that must be had by citizens of a city in order for the city to thrive. Cultural events are one such outlet for enthusiasm. People here in Tallahassee have football as their common pastime, but that is about it. Occasionally, a good symphony rolls through town, or the North Florida Fair (yippee). I recently looked up the tour schedule for Eric Idle's Greedy Bastard Tour, and the Reduced Shakespeare Company, two tours which I would very much like to see, but unfortunately neither of them comes anywhere near the entire southeast U.S.. If you look around at Boston, Chicago, NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, etc., it seems like every performer worth their salt goes through these cities. If you don't have culture, all you have is a collection of roads, buildings, and people.

That would be the Reduced Shakespeare Company. They've been going for over twenty years now, so it's possible they might be the originators.

Fitting all six books into a reasonably long show will be hilarious. Think "Reduced Shakespeare Company". I'm all for it.

Lior