Frost’s crackling, too, but still she’s cozy
Amidst the fields’ light silv’ry dust...
(You’re all supposing I’ll write «rosy»,
As Pushkin did—and so I must!)
Slick as a dance parquet swept nicely,
The brooklet glints and glistens icily.
A joyous band of skate-shod boys
Cuts graceful ruts to rowdy noise.
A clumsy goose, by contrast, wishing
To swim upon the glassy sheet,
Lands stumbling on its red webbed feet,
And slips and tumbles. Swirling, swishing,
Gay twinking stars—the show’s first try—
Bedaub the creekside ere they die.

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

Gebstadter, Egbert B., “Copper, Silver, Gold: an Indestructible Metallic Alloy”.
Perth: Acidic Books, 1979.
A formidable hodge-podge, turgid and confused — yet remarkably similar to the present work. Professor Gebstadter’s Shandean digressions include some excellent examples of indirect self-reference. Of particular interest is a reference in its well-annotated bibliography to an isomorphic, but imaginary, book.

The ultimate explanation of a gas’s behavior always lies on the molecular level, just as the ultimate explanation of a society’s political behavior always lies at the “grass roots level”.

— To respond to situations very flexibly.

— To take advantage of fortuitous circumstances.

— To make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages.

— To recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation.

— To find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them.

—  To draw distinctions between situations despite similarities may link them.

—  To synthesize new concepts by taking old them together in new ways.

—  To come up with ideas which are novel.

Since they are physical entities, our brains run without being told how to run.

Champernowne and Turing were both avid chess players and invented “round-the-house” chess: after your move, run around the house, — if you get back before your opponent has moved, you’re entitled to another move.

Artificial intelligence is whatever hasn’t been done yet.

Driving down a country road, you run into a swarm of bees. You don’t just duly take note of it; the whole situation is immediately placed in perspective by a swarm of “replays” that crowd into your mind. Typically, you think: “Sure I am lucky my window wasn’t open!” — or worse, the reverse: “Too bad my window wasn’t closed!”. “Lucky I wasn’t on my bike!”; “Too bad I didn’t come along five seconds earlier”. Strange but-possible replays: “If that had been a deer, I could have been killed!”; “I bet those bees would have rather had a collision with a rosebush”. Even stranger replays: “Too bad those bees weren’t dollar bills!”; “Lucky those bees weren’t made of cement!”; “Too bad it wasn’t just one bee instead of a swarm”; “Lucky I wasn’t the swarm instead of being me”.

What slips naturally and what doesn’t — and why?

In a recent issue of “The New Yorker” magazine, the following excerpt from the “Philadelphia Welcomat” was reprinted:
If Leonardo da Vinci had been born a female the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel might never have been painted.

“The New Yorker” commented:
And if Michelangelo had been Siamese twins, the work would have been completed in half the time.

The point of “The New Yorker”’s comment is not that such counterfactuals are false; it is more that anyone who would entertain such an idea — anyone who would “slip” the sex or number of a given human being — would have to be a little loony. Ironically, though, in the same issue, the following sentence, concluding a book review, was printed without blushing:
I think professor Philipp Frank would have enjoyed both of these books enormously.

Now poor Professor Frank is dead; and clearly it is nonsense to suggest that someone could read books written after his death. So why wasn’t this serious sentence also scoffed at? Somehow, in some difficult-to-pin-down sense, the parameters slipped in this sentence do not violate our sense of “possibility” as much as in the earlier examples.

Something allows us to imagine “all other things being equal” better in this one than in the others. But why? What is it about the way we classify events and people that makes us know deep down what is “sensible” to slip, and what is “silly”?