The meaning of 'The Slip'?

[bradm]

Does anybody know if the members of 'The Slip' chose that name for a reason, and if so, what it is?

I ask because (I think) I remember Doulas Hofstadter writing about a colleague of his who left work, drove home, parked his car in the garage, shut it off, and took off his wristwatch.

The reason he took off his wristwatch was that he didn't unfsaten his seatbelt: his brain had, in the processing of the command "unbuckle the seatbelt," slipped one place in its list-of-things-that-have-a-buckle from the seatbelt to the wristwatch; he had done the unbuckling, but just unbuckled the wristwatch instead of the seatbelt.

I find myself noticing this kind thing over and over when I want to do this to that and end up doing somethng conceptually close to this to that or this to something conceptually close to that, and so it seems like the concept of this kind of 'slip' is a more common thing than just a quirk of brainm.

So if I were to associate (not assign; more a what-it-means-to-me-thing) a meaning with 'The Slip' it would be something like those kind of slips.

Aloha,

Brad

[Douglas]

I "slipped" into a wall yesterday.

I wanted to keep walking straight down the hall, but turned instead, right into the wall.

[ollie]

I ask because (I think) I remember Doulas Hofstadter writing about a colleague of his who left work, drove home, parked his car in the garage, shut it off, and took off his wristwatch.

Thanks for the link Brad... a lot of fascinating ideas in that entry. I'd really like to read Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

And I particularly like Hofstadter's law:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

This self-referencing adage was coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his 1979 magnum opus Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It is often cited among programmers, especially in discussions of techniques to improve productivity, such as The Mythical Man-Month or Extreme Programming. Behind its whimsical façade, Hofstadter's Law is a profound statement of the difficulty of accurately estimating the amount of time it will take to complete tasks of any substantial complexity.

[bradm]

GEB is a wonderful book. I also have a collection of columns he did in Scientific American magazine. For several decades, Martin Gardner wrote a SciAm column called Mathematical Games. When Gardner retired the column, SciAm asked Hofstadter to write about whatever he wanted. He ended up calling his column Metamagical Themas, an anagram of "mathematical games". It's a really good reference for the prisoner's dilemma and related ideas.

Aloha,

Brad

[Del]

I believe the name The Slip refers to something to do with pottery. Something about one of the classes they took in college or something like that...

[bouche]

One day after a workout at the gym, I went to put on my work clothes after the shower.

WHen I went to put on my pants, I noticed that I couldn't put them on over my tied up shoes.

I realized that my routine had, I suppose, "SLIPPED" a bit as I have never before had put on socks, shoes, and tied them before putting on my pants. But here was the first, and hopefully last time.

My theory is that they just found a domain name that wasn't used up, and named the band after it.

www.theslip.com