Talk:Patent Pending (short story)

Change - "a prostitute (whom "Purvis" emphasizes is not from the Place Pigalle, which he derides as being "full of Americans")"
This concerns a minor change I made because the existing text:

"a prostitute (whom "Purvis" emphasizes is not from the Place Pigalle, which he derides as being "full of Americans")"

didn't really convey the sense of the original story as written by Arthur C. Clarke and published.

I found the original article reference to the Place Pigalle a bit puzzling; as it stood, it wasn't even accurate. Clarke's narrating character Harry Purvis didn't "deride" the Place Pigalle as being "full of Americans."

Moreover, Clarke's character 'Georges' hired not one, but TWO prostitutes, a male and a female, to make a "professional" recording of the act of sex with the professor's invention (an electroencephalograph capable of recording sensations of a human brain for replay to a second person's brain - like a video recorder, but incorporating ALL the human senses, not just sight and sound. This recording presumably could capture touch, smell, taste, temperature (a slightly different tactile channel to touch), emotional response and most importantly, physical orgasm.

(it ought to be noted that 'replaying' visual and emotional responses from EEG activity has actually been reported by "neurohacking" experimenters many years after Clarke's short story "Patent Pending." My short article "Neurohacking" in ComputorEdge magazine, "Beyond Personal Computing" feature, http://vfrickey.tripod.com/resumes/neurohacker.pdf contains wider references to that and other evoked potential technology, including anecdotal references to a "working orgasmatron," in other words, a device that could excite areas of the human brain in a manner that - according to the people talking about it - faithfully reproduces the sensation of human orgasm.  This information is presented not as an "argument from authority" but solely for fellow editors' edification)

Clarke's original text described by the original article's author was:

"He did not go anywhere near the Place Pigalle, because that was full of Americans and prices were accordingly exorbitant,"

clearly indicating that Purvis wasn't deriding that district of Paris because it was "full of Americans"; rather, the character Georges avoided the Place Pigalle because "because that was full of Americans and prices were accordingly exorbitant".

You see, in the story "Patent Pending," Clarke's character 'Georges' was on a tight budget, and hiring the required pair of prostitutes for his "recording" would have been prohibitively expensive at the prevailing rates in the Place Pigalle.

I changed the text to:

"male-female pair of prostitutes whose technique and physical attributes were more up to the job (In telling the story to the audience at the White Hart, Harry Purvis emphasized that the pair were not from the Place Pigalle, because the Parisian professor's budget didn't extend to it - "He did not go anywhere near the Place Pigalle, because that was full of Americans and prices were accordingly exorbitant")"

This change more faithfully reproduces the sense of Arthur C. Clarke's original story "Patent Pending."loupgarous (talk) 13:23, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Is the "stub" tag truly appropriate to an article about a very short short story?
The subject matter of this article, "Patent Pending," is one of a series of "science-fiction tall tales" written by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. None of them is very long, and the entire anthology of these tales published as "Tales from the White Hart" (the pub in which each tale is "told" by their fictional narrator Harry Purvis, BSc, probably Sc.D, but probably not MRS, according to a passage from one of the tales by its actual narrator, Sir Arthur) probably doesn't come up to an entire megabyte (the digital world's approximate size for a "book").

This being the case, it'd be impossible to describe "Patent Pending" more than I and other editors already have without being in danger of exceeding WP (and common law) "fair use" guidelines.

Removing the article for lack of substance would unduly deprive WP users of a potentially valuable resource (let's say, someone researching uses of the term "patent pending," or a user curious about a reference to Sir Arthur's story "Patent Pending").

I'm removing the stub tag. Please contact me if this is not an option according to WP rules. loupgarous (talk) 20:20, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

corrected errors in the text as to which character did what action
Re-reading the article, I realized that several actions in the plot of "Patent Pending" were attributed to the wrong characters. The most interesting parts of the plot were attributed to the inventor of the brainwave recording device when they were actually being done covertly by his assistant on the assistant's own time (and money).

I corrected those problems in the article.loupgarous (talk) 03:45, 18 October 2013 (UTC)