Slashdot Mirror
Fibs - Fibonacci-based Poetry
Gregory K. writes "April is National Poetry Month (and, it turns out, Math Awareness Month), and on my blog, I decided to get people writing poetry based on the Fibonacci sequence. The poems are six lines, 20 syllables long with the syllable pattern 1/1/2/3/5/8, though they can go longer, obviously. I've been calling 'em Fibs, and people have been writing them on pop culture, politics, math, and more."
First
Post!
I bet
nobody
can beat me to it
with a Fibonacci poem!
Not to take away from this poster's message, but this has been done elsewhere as well. The lyrics to Tool's song "Lateralus" are written in Fibonacci rhythm (I think up to 13).
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
well i'm too tired to think of anything clever and witty, but hurray for math nerdiness!
Funny, yours didn't seem to fit when I read it aloud, because I say "poem" with one syllable.
Here
we
reply
to shit, all
insensitive clods.
Slashpoem, mathematical.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
I thought Slashdot Readers had More important things To write about; but I was wrong.
aich
tee
tee pee
colon slash slash
slash dot dot org poem
I
Wait
For The
Beowulf Hot
Natalie Grits Goatse
Signal Eleven Penis Bird
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Math,
Makes,
My head,
Quake with pain.
Writing a poem based
On Fibonacci does the same.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
These
Poems:
Truly
Pedantic
Methodology.
Extremely restrictive process.
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
Damn!
This
Will be
Tough for the
Mods, if they count all
the syllables in every post!
Did
You
Know That
The Sequence
Originally
Described The Humping Of Rabbits?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
deb
i
compiz
wtf
compile mother bitch
and something about the seasons
no, wait, i am probably thinking about haiku
damn this package! it has me all confused to the point that i can't even write a poem.
Well
I
For One
Will Welcome
(It's Mandatory)
Our Fibonacci Overlords!
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
If you are going to laugh at the article just because some rock band did something similar six years ago, then by your own standards Tool would have to be a laughingstock as well. Composers of art music have been using the Fibonacci sequence for decades. Bartok back in the 1930s and 1940s, Iannis Xenakis in the 1950s, Per Norgard in the 1970s, Sofia Gubaidulina in the 1980s. What took Tool so long?
It is obligatory at this point to mention that the band Tool (very heavy, but not simple music) used this technique in the song Lateralus.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
"What took Tool so long?"
Being born?
Exactly, maybe the writer of the article is too young to have become aware of the style earlier. There's no reason the OP should have been so hard on him.
OH boy, I can see a law suit here from the First Internet Backgammon Server guys! Although as long as The fibonacci guys stay away from music they'll be fine... oh wait....
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
Fib?
Oh.
Not cheese.
Some numbers.
They add up to some
Other numbers that come later.
You can keep going this way until you are bored too.
Bad-
ger,
badger,
mushroom, mush-
room, snake, it's a snake.
One
one
two three
five eight thirteen twen-
ty-one thirty-four fifty-five
Stoppit! This isn't Digg!!!!!!
But yeah, personal blog self-promotion - uber lame.
-Jar
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
01 It
01 is
02 really
03 not taxing
05 to create a Fib,
08 but still they are interesting
13 sequences of numbers. We are familiar with
21 the 'rabbit generation' origins of the sequence, but it can also describe
34 the number of petals on a flower, or the number of curves on a sunflower head, on a pineapple, or even on a pinecone.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
Who gives a fuck about Bartok?
Unless you're younger than 10 years old(or live in a undeveloped country), Tool has performed at venu near you.
The author of this article is a total nerd if he hasn't heard Lateralus.
Look
out,
Slashdot
has found you!
The nerds are coming!
Hope you like being popular.
Hey!
Funny
Most fibs
I have seen
are about the fibs.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Gregory K is also the author of Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of 'Diff'rent Strokes'.
Now
that's
a show
worth watching
since it features guests
like First Lady Nancy Reagan
does any one how to use fibs properly to trade the stock market?
... an hour and a half too late
8 &cid=15082601
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18246
What took Tool so long?
Please, slashdot didnt exist that time, nor do fools like you and me reading such a thing
Primes
Also
Make a poem
though the size can get
rather large, rather quick so
I will stop while I am a bit over ten.
Powers
twos for this post
grow still faster than those darn primes
now I have to get sixteen syllables on one line; 4th is good!
Powers three
Oh where may these possibly be seen?
Google Labs Aptitude Test could be given a new little problem to stumble and confuse Stanford Doctors
gregor k is also the guy who was turned into a huge beetle?
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Reminds me of a comedian I heard one time who was from the deep south. He said when he moved to Chicago, everyone made fun of the way he said his cat's name - with 4 syllables. The name? Shithead. :-)
(Shee-it hey-ed)
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Easy?
No,
Not true.
It is simple.
Don't blindly split prose,
produce a poetic stanza!
Thought there werent many elements in {Poets}intersection{Mathematicians} !! A Fib Newly Attempted: Mood siesta now Fibonacci laughing aloud! Poets would love this: a song that any professor Would listen to and approve sure And, the studious Write now a... Poem! A Fib!
Huh! needed formatting!
A
Fib
Newly
Attempted:
Mood siesta now
Fibonacci laughing aloud!
Poets would love this: a song that any professor
Would listen to and approve sure
And, the studious
Write now a...
Poem!
A
Fib!
Who the fuck is Tool?
War
Debt
Iraq
OBL
The World Trade Center
The World is filled with tragedy
(C) 2006, me
Cheap
Drugs
Call Now
We're Waiting
Do Not Hesitate
Lincoln Building Tether Pineapple Goat
Slash.
Dot.
Slashdot.
Slashdot rules !
Slashdot rules big-time !
Slashdot rules big-time. Go Slashdot !
(Sub sucks for rules where necessary.)
Roses are
Red.
Telephones
Are plastic.
Disco is
dead.
But this poem is
Fantastic!
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/poetry.html
-Tom
God,
all!
It's fib,
version A.
Edit idea...
No! Is rev B, if still a dog.
Not many people know that Tool's Lateralus actually follwos the Fibonacci sequence. Black, (1) and (1) White are, (2) all I see, (3) in my infancy. (5) Red and yellow then came to be (8) reaching out to me (5) lets me see (3)
Must...
stop...
fibbing!
Got to get...
back to my haikus!
So many syllables... wasted!
This
form
forces
fine feelings
into abstruse lines
each longer longing to affix
a meaning to creations made live by febrile minds
and for this new spring trick I thank both you and SlashDot. Well done. Though if continued cumbersome.
http://www.alanreynolds.nl/
Here
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Dude, fibs are used to trade the vote market.
Much fun, cool exercise of the faculties, and you'ld be amazed at the stuff I've seen people free associate after trying it.
-Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Nerds
With
Long words
Making rhymes
Bit too forced at times
Who says geeks can't write this stuff too
Why is this considered Science?
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
I personally rejected it for a few reasons:
1. Starting with one-, two-, and three-syllable lines leaves the stanza generally sounding forced.
2. Once you get to 21-syllable lines, you've generally reached the limits of absurdity within good taste.
That leaves you with lines of 5, 8, and 13 syllables, and perhaps 3 or 21, if the circumstances are right. That just isn't as interesting as it initially looked.
That said, perhaps I should RTFP now, to actuallly see how well the writer got it to work.
Bush
said
that the
weapons of
mass distruction in
Iraq posed an imminent threat.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Three and five make eight.
Eight and five will make eleven.
Eleven and eight will make number nineteen.
© Frightened_Turtle 2006
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Rock
Tool
Bartok
Xenakis
All of them are great
Fibonacci sequence or not
you lamer. the last line is too long. try something like.....
Your Ipod is stuck up your ass
what an idiot
I'ld say that if /. is going to carry "news" about Star Wars movies and be paid for in part by toy vendors like Think Geek[1] then fibonacci poetry fits right in. The real issue, which, in fairness, /. is working on, is a better system of tags and categories so that users can set which kinds of stuff we see.
btw, if you liked the stapler poetry, wanna write some? I'm always looking for more ;->
-Rustin
[1] One of these days I'm gonna open a real geek store, selling oscilloscopes, power supplies for industrial lasers, smart materials, nanotech and superconductor devkits, custom O'Reilly manuals, and, someday, sharks! with frickin' lasers on their heads!
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
I copied the following directly from this website which has an interesting analysis of tool's lateralus album.
There's a Fibonacci in Maynard's lyrics, specifically the syllables:
black [1]
then [1]
white are [2]
all I see [3]
in my infancy [5]
red and yellow then came to be [8]
reaching out to me [5]
lets me see [3]
there is [2]
so [1]
much [1]
more and [2]
beckons me [3]
to look through to these [5]
infinite possibilities [8]
as below so above and beyond I imagine [13]
drawn outside the lines of reason [8]
push the envelope [5]
watch it bend [3]
I suppose it's not actually a true Fibonacci, since it does reverse itself.
... And it's not only for the geeks! Danish poet Inger Christensen's famous poem Alphabet from 1981 is based on the Fibonacci sequence. It's a beautiful systemic poem about everything that exists in the world and how it is under threat.
More about Inger Christensen.
Ugh.
Rules.
Structure.
Makes me wince.
Perhaps I should try...
Running around naked with my hair on fire screaming, "ANARCHY! ANARCHY! Take that Fibonacci, you wiper of other peoples bottoms! go away and I shall taunt you no more!"
try:
....foo
except:
....print "Display"
....print "Fibonacci"
....count = prevcount = 1
....while prevcount <= 7000:
........print prevcount ; count, prevcount = count + prevcount, count
The way *I* read the program (pronouncing each special character except for the quotes and colons), it's a fib. AND it does something useful. It displays the first twenty Fibonacci numbers!
Pronounced:
(1) try
(1) foo
(2) ex cept
(3) print dis play
(5) print fib on ac ci
(8) count e quals prev count e quals one
(13) while prev count less than or e qual to sev en thou sand
(21) print prev count sem i col on count com ma prev count e quals count plus prev count com ma count
Now that's *real* nerdy. Geeks should be proud.
Ha!
Ha!
Nice Try
First line wrong,
That's unfortunate,
I so wanted you to be right!
If you read this alound (or at least subvocalize), you'll see a patern, and patterns in my opinion are quintessentially mathematical:
What makes this pattern interesting is not what it is, but what it is not. It's like you can hear a quantum entanglement with the poem it is not, but easily might have been. A lesser poet would have written: "TIGer, TIGer, BURNing BRIGHTly", which would be a metrical form called "trochaic quadrameter". A trochee is a two syllbale unit (or "foot") with stress on the first syllable (like this: dah DUM), as opposed to an iamb which stressed the second (va VOOM).
Hiwawatha is an example of trochaic quadrameter:
Four footed forms are very solid and predictable, but are seldom chosen by profesional poets because they quickly become monotonous and susceptible to parody, as in this excerpt of a Geroge Strong's lampoon of Hiawatha:
Tiger's unusual and broken meter gives it a haunting feeling (haunted by the missing syllables?) that fits its subject perfectly.
Getting to the subject of the article, efforts like this are often successful at getting people who are interested in poetry to try their hands at it. I think in part because it's so easy to be write bad poetry, it's helpful to have the safety net of a highy arbitrary form to fall back on: after all, what can you expect given the restrictions? The 5-7-5 structure of Haiku is also popular for the same purposes and reasons.
I wonder whether a similar effort could be made using patterns in scansion, like in "Tiger". Maybe you could create a set of rules encoding messages in stress and rhyme, and then set out a task to "encrypt" a message as verse.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Hi
Bob
Click Here
VIAGRA
Penis Enlargement
Satisfy your woman tonight
I
think
pointing
at a song
by the band called Tool
is an exercise in lameness
considering that its been done since way before them
1: Love. 1: Hate. 2: Love hate. 3: Hate love hate. 5: Love hate hate love hate. 8: Hate love hate love hate hate love hate. 13: Love hate hate love hate hate love hate love hate hate love hate. Why just add syllables when you can add entire lines?
It..
is..
sim-ple.
wrong again,
That's four syllables!
Try counting them one at a time.
One.
One.
Then Two.
Three is next.
Five, of course, comes next.
Then Eight. It's getting hard to do.
Next is 1D. We're counting in Hex - this is slashdot!
Gotta love the surprise ending!
Yeah..
well..
Fuck it!
you were close,
and a great reply.
Guess it is harder than it looks!
This \
is \
going \
to spiral \
way out of control \
I can see the disaster now \
Websites, blogs, podcasts, and wikipedia entries \
All written in Fibonacci sequences, getting longer and longer as they go... \
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
While I do find this whole 'fibs' thing interesting, I wonder whats to stop people from using any methodical mathematics to create 'poetry'. The idea just seems irrelevant to me.
but I haven't seen a counter posted yet.
(1) Fear.
(1) Doubt.
(2) Success?
(3) Who can know?
(5) Nausea overwhelms me.
(8) What will the future bring my way?
(13)Surely my past will play a part, but what could it be?
(21)Can I live up to my expectations or am I destined to rot in this small town?
(34)New York City acts as fodder for my dreams of a better time and place, where I can live my life in a perpetual state of carefree bliss.
In soviet Russia fibs poem always write you!
\u262D = \u5350
Biz
plan:
First: write
a poem
on Fibonacci.
Second: row of three question marks
Third: profit which is followed by exclamation mark.
And,
too:
In South
Korea
Only old people
write poems with Fibonaccis.
young
geeks
waxing
pathetic
math and poetry
go outside, it's a fine spring day
Win ;)
Mac
*nix
Religions
Emacs beats vi
Prehaps it's not redundant -- just recursive!
I
Love
Geek Poems
Make my day
Just a bit sweeter
They are worth optimizing for
In the 9th movement is a conductor's "solo", where he motions before a silent orchestra, the distance between his hands growing ever larger according to the sequence.
Quick, where can I download an MP3 rendition?
Verse
Makes one
Sound just like
A Captain Kirk speech.
Hey!
You!
Yeah, you.
With the face!
What you lookin' at?
Gonna break my foot up yer ass!
Oh,
No.
To Think
the haikus
written on slashdot
were bad enough for all of us.
---
But who cares now, anyway?
Soon someone will write
A slashdot Fibs plus Haiku.
Guess I am late to the game so this post will probably never be seen, but why not do it in concrete form? Makes the opening lines a lot harder!
A
Z
IT
RUN
ALWAYS
ALPHABET
C
U
INA
LILBIT
DEARLOVE
Shoot... I hopped in the shower, and then it occurred to me that 13 decimal is D Hex, not 1D.
Ha,
Ha!
Nelson's
been quoted,
This is what you get
For not clicking on the preview!
Now I, slashdot math Nazi, can rest and read more posts.
Troll
Mod me down
Not up for this fib
Karma can't lie, I am a troll
We are the Borg...
The main bass riff consists of a bar of 9, a bar of 8, and a bar of 7; note that 987 is the 17th entry in the Fibonacci sequence.
... swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human", and "We'll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one's been / Spiral out: Keep going".
In fact, that's how the song was invented: the bassist came up with the riff, the drummer -- who likes to work numerology into his beats -- noticed that it was part of the Fibonacci sequence, the lead singer thought the riff reminded him of a spiral, they originally called the song "987", and wrote some lyrics around it.
The Fibonacci sequence is intimately related to the golden spiral, the shape you get when you continually inscribe rotated golden rectangles within each other. (The golden mean, describing the dimensions of a golden rectangle, is obtained as the limit of the ratio of successive Fibonacci numbers late in the sequence.) It ties in with the spiral theme of the song, including lyrics such as "I embrace my desire to
The album references the spiritual energy-field "merkaba" (http://www.merkaba.org/) techniques
of inner love and light -- "Merkaba" is also the title of one of Tool's earlier songs -- as well as the "golden mean spiral of love" (http://www.floweroflife.org/spiral01.htm).
Fib
Poem
Art form
Based on math
Beauty meets reason
Or is it just a long haiku?
Po-
et-
ry real-
ly should nev-
er be written ex-
clusively by geeks on a for-
um such as slashdot. They tend to really sound horrib-
when
I
try to
perform a
SQL injection
I get caught because i'm stupid
where do i put that damn apostrophe anyway?
hehehe
To the slashdotted site (copied from my submission to the blog comments page)
A fib 404 message in the public domain:
This
Page
Is not.
404
You'll find nothing here
You'd better just click "back"-- move on.
I
won't
ever use
IIS
while apache is still alive
TK
Here's a fib that starts with zero:
Marge? Marge? Homer? Where are you? Um - I am somewhere Where I do not know where I am. Has anyone ever seen the movie Tron?
You guys, stop this now! This is worse than Vogon poetry!
Why
Not write
In binary?
The computer will like it more!
Each line is at least twice as much fun as the one that precedes it
Now who wants to take the next step and have a go at a much more challenging goal: poetry using hexadecimal metre?
Deutsch
through
Balkans
Germany
UKandUS
WWIcrap
That one was really tough to have it make any sense.
I eat pie
.
Please...
Blueberry Pie...
Yum!
It's my favorite.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Must
Bomb
Iraq
or Saddam
will attack again
Like on that dark September day.
-- GWB
I should just quit while I'm behind, but I have to get it right! I blame it on Daylight Savings Time! (Yeah, any port in a storm.)
Thank God that any man can at least count to 21!
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Three and five make eight.
Then eight and five will make thirteen.
Thirteen and eight gets twenty-one.
This could continue for a very long time, indeed.
On and on we go, counting every syllable hoping that the count will be correct.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
black then white are all I see in my infancy red and yellow then came to be ...
now,
I
see why
Captain Kirk's
way of speaking was
such a de-light to listen to.
-Aaron
TIME is the Aether...
I,
We,
Must not
Welcome these
New Fibonacci
Poem overlords - no "Fibs" here.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
As a poet, I don't have a positive reaction to this structure. I find it superficial and annoying. As with many odd structures, it likely requires specific subject matter in order to be effective.
Structure doesn't create great poetry, unless it's concrete poetry. Instead, structure should automatically come out of what's being expressed. This is like the Apple III. Apple built the case before the innards and the machine overheated and popped chips. Form comes from function, not the other way around.
I
Knew
reading these
comments was going
to be risky based on the past
For what it's worth . . . Ron Silliman's 1981 book Tjanting uses the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of sentences in each paragraph, starting with 1 and ending with 4,181; and the mid-century French Oulipo group is famous for its application of mathematical and other formal restraints to the production of poems.
/. should have used phi as the icon for this story
Few people are claiming that Tool is the first band to use the Fibonacci sequence in music. However, despite the fact that using the Fibonacci sequence in lyrics has been done before, Tool has taken this one step further.
:)
Not only do the lyrics conform to the Fibonacci sequence in Tool's song "Lateralus", but the percussion does as well. The first line of the chorus is played in 9, the second line of the chorus is played in 8, and the third line of the chorus is played in 7. If you put these numbers together, you get 987 which is the sixteenth number in the Fibonacci sequence. This was intentional, as Tool's drummer, Danny Carey, mentioned this in an article in Modern Drummer magazine (although he incorrectly called 987 the twelth step of the Fibonacci sequence). While that's fairly impressive, what's really astounding is the fact that the song sounds very natural and most people would not have noticed the odd timing of the song if it had not been pointed out to them.
Anyway, simply pointing out that something has been done before is not constructive. Just about everything has been done before, so instead of just whining over and over again that something has already been done, why not take the time to look further into modern works of art. They may not be the first to do something, but there are good modern artists out there that will be able to put their own creative touch into the work. And yes, I am a drummer.
Spock,
What
Do you
Make of this?
A new lifeform, or...
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I think the end of Rusty Cage by Soundgarden is in 19/3 time. Primus has a song called Eleven that is in 11/3 time.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Now put down that joint and get off that high (PUN!) horse before you hurt yourself.
That so many people find something interesting in Tool's music is what makes them a good band.
I don't see people starting up websites to analyze your-teeny-bimbo-marketing-droid-here's
addition to the musical landscape.
For those who took the time to read this post: Lateralus is a great song about the work of Carlos Castaneda...anyone interested should check out 'The Fire Within' to understand what the lyrics in that song are about.
No Thing In the Beginning There was a Number And the Number was minus one *** One Neo Defeats Whole army Of agent Smith clones - Whoa! I bet you could not do that. *** In the next fib the number 8 is hidden but it is there. End Is Geek's goal However The girls need it too o0o O
No
Thing
In the
Beginning
There was a Number
And the Number was minus one
***
One
Neo
Defeats
Whole army
Of agent Smith clones -
Whoa! I bet you could not do that.
***
In the next fib the number 8 is hidden but it is there.
End
Is
Geek's goal
However
The girls need it too.
o0o
O