Reading

• May 6 2009 - Transcendent Man! ... I read the singularity is near last year and really enjoyed it, despite a few misgivings for Kurzweil’s ego and some dubious use of statistics. One of the things I found myself really intrigued by was Kurweil himself and this movie looks like a fun look at the man and his ideas. Do I believe him? Part of me wants to, definitely. The ultimate end-game of the singularity is fascinating and wondrous, but I actually found some of the more intermediate steps in his projections to be more fascinating.
• May 31 2008 - Vampires in Space ... I read a very fun book on my holiday in Manitoba this last few weeks. It’s written by a biologist who has turned to fiction with an eye to producing some good hard core science based fiction. I would compare his work to William Gibson and Arthur C. Clarke. The book is called “BlindSight” by Peter Watts, and I’ve added it to my LibraryThing, there is a link to my full review below.
• May 7 2008 - poetic words = exciters of nearby symbols ... In GEB Hofstadter mentions the complexity in building an isomorphism between two poems written in two languages. “In ordinary language, the task of translation is more straightforward, since to each word or phrase in the original language, there can usually be found a corresponding word or phrase in the new language. By contrast, in a poem of this type, [Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll] many “words” do not carry ordinary meaning, but act purely as exciters of nearby symbols.
• May 5 2008 - I've forgotten how much I enjoy Unix ... I just finished reading “The Dream Machine” and getting a very cool look at some early history of computing including the birth of Multics and it’s spin off and almost more interesting the birth of tools like email and ftp as a way to actually do something with the ARPANET that was being built. A great read for anyone interested in how we collectively have arrived at where we are today in computing.
• Mar 27 2008 - I have some reading to do! ... http://listverse.com/literature/top-15-science-fiction-book-series I came across this list of the best 15 science fiction series ever written. The reason I love seeing this is 1) it contains a bunch of science fiction series I’ve already read and thought very highly of and 2) contains some series I’ve never even heard of, which of course is exciting since it means I have some reading to do. For all I know the guy who wrote the list is totally unqualified and preying on people’s ego by throwing familiar items on a list with a bunch of obscure ones, but I’m gonna go with it.