tiger!tiger!.de

Tiger!Tiger! was the name under which I used to play Paradise Netrek on the server defiant in Kiel around 1995, instead of working on my Ph.D. thesis. I took the name from the title of Alfred Bester's 1956 novel, which happened to be on my desk that day. And Bester, of course, took it from first line of William Blake's poem "The Tyger". When, in 2000, the time came to get my own domain, I found that tigertiger.de was still available, and took it. Much later, I started working in computational biology, and the poem is fitting better than ever. The tigertiger domain has been ever growing since: My laptop, random.tigertiger.de and its MacOSX alter ego macrandom.tigertiger.de, are named after Arthur Dent's daughter in Douglas Adam's Mostly Harmless. arbitrary.tigertiger.de, my office desktop, is the name of the General Contact Unit (a talking spaceship) in Iain M. Banks' novella The State of the Art. The machine serving these pages, a Strato virtual server, is intertiger.tigertiger.de, and tinytiger is... but that's quite another story. -xris Christoph Best's home page 虎虎 เสือ เสือ

Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder and what art Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And, when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand and what dread feet? What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears, Did He smile His work to see? Did He who made the lamb make thee? Tiger, tiger, burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? William Blake (1789) Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun. Alfred Bester (1953) • more