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Ask: Who is Tara Ploughman?
Google shows her quotes ALL over the web. But it does not (within my googling ability anyway) give a hint who or where she actually is. Since PG has her quotes on his website, I hoped it would be alright to ask here.
- monkeybusiness 18y agoYou're right. It's strange to find her quotes in so many places without any biographical information. Now I'm curious too. Combined with the fact that my googling pride has been hurt.
- icey 18y agoOne of life's mysteries, evidently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174149 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174149
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- ryanvm 18y agoDunno but she has a Twitter page. Not sure why PG would quote such a weirdo. https://twitter.com/TaraPloughman https://twitter.com/TaraPloughman
- jgrahamc 18y agoTara Ploughman looks to me like it's an anagram of Not Paul Graham.
- _pius 18y agoGreat catch!
- icey 18y agoI think this is the answer; it's tough to find any quotes of hers without being accompanied by at least a mention of him. Someone should put a bio up of her, mentioning that she works for Setec Astronomy.
- pg 18y agoI'm sure it's just a coincidence... (It turns out if you want to write one-sentence essays, you have to attribute them to someone else.)
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- pg 18y agoI should add that the first person to catch this was a guy called John Baldwin, who sent me an email about it in May 2008, but who agreed to keep it quiet.
- Raplh 18y agoIf you want to kill the thread I can live with that. Or perhaps this is the answer to the social experiment you implicitly performed.
- pg 18y agoToo late for that. But it wasn't really a social experiment. I just wanted to say something that was only one sentence, and this seemed the most convenient way.
- monkeybusiness 18y agoOnly if everyone reading this thread commits to a vow of silence and in return pg (or should I say Tara?) agrees to take care of our children after we die.
- Xichekolas 18y agoMore likely a way to get around the social stigma attached to quoting yourself. If he put the same quote up, and attributed it to himself, people would pay less attention to the message and spend more time dealing with their feelings regarding this stigma. Thankfully now we have Twitter, which is an acceptable medium to post witty things you come up with, and these witticisms are by default attributed to you.
- 18y ago
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- monkeybusiness 18y agoDid you really figure this out in the time since the question was posed? Please say no, so I don't feel so inadequate.
- jgrahamc 18y agoYes, but I have a strange ability to see certain patterns in data very quickly. I almost instantly saw without thinking that it contained Paul Graham. This ability manifests itself on a daily basis in one useful fashion. I can look at an entire screen of text (say a log file) and almost immediately take the whole thing in and spot something 'odd' or 'interesting' to examine. Drives me nuts watching people using computers though. I can find the button or icon they are slowly searching for in a flash.
- whacked_new 18y agoDo you play "spot the difference" puzzles? Are they too easy for you? How about sudoku? Sorry... I'm adding on more questions! Hope they aren't too cumbersome: are normal anagram puzzles all trivial for you? is "where's waldo" equally easy?
- HeyLaughingBoy 18y agoI don't play puzzles much, but anagrams are usually easy. It doesn't seem to work as well with pictures. I don't know what "where's waldo" is. Words to me often look like what they mean. My favorite example is "eager." It just looks like it's barely restrained, waiting to leap forward: a kind of "visual onomatopoeia" I guess. I used to think everyone was like this when I was a kid, but asking a few people about it soon pointed out that I was just a weirdo :-) I think the reason it's declined with age is that as a child I read constantly - I always had my nose in a book - so words became associated with mental pictures. As an adult I read much less.
- pmjordan 18y agoThis sounds a little like Synaesthesia - which is common enough, and wouldn't exactly make you a weirdo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaesthesia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaesthesia
- fshultz 18y agoCheck out the first quote: http://www.paulgraham.com/quo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/quo.html
- jasonlbaptiste 18y agoNickB's wife.