Oct
17
2008
Just finished this delightful little book, Rapture for the Geeks, by Dooling (see MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series for the origin of the expression of his title). A fun little book, and a bit different from what I was expecting. It is about the singularity, of course, but it also channels parts of the Jargon file / Hacker’s Dictionary, Raymond’s Art of Unix Programming and other works of Unix and Open Source advocacy, with a dash of the Science v. Religion discourse of the likes of Dennett, Hitchins and Dawkins.
I quite enjoyed the book, though there is nothing really new here in terms of an original contribution to the topics by Dooling. Those unfamiliar with the concept of the technological singularity, though, will find a lot of good references and ideas to follow up from here. Dooling collects quotes and excepts from all of the great original thinkers, from Turing through Kurzweil. I was right with him till probably the last chapter where, to my mind, he looses the courage of his convictions on the value of religion regarding its moral and philosophical contributions. He seems early on to be right with the scientists when talking about minds, brains and the “soul”. So found his wishy-washiness in the end a bit perplexing.
But as I said there is a lot of fun to be had. I haven’t mentioned my admiration of the poetry of Emily Dickenson yet in this blog. For some reason, she appears to appeal enormously to those of the geeky mindset, especially her poem about the Mind/Brain. Dooling presents a Python program version of Emily’s famous poem (again not his work, but that of Martelli and Ravenscroft of the Python Cookbook fame, and Google and, BTW, who are working with Guido, the inventor of Python, at Google on the Python language and other projects). It is an example of the pure poetry of programming in general, and the Python programming language in particular.
Aug
22
2007
Shulan’s been in a Horror Movie kind of mode for a while, ever since being recommended a Stephen King novel to read. Anyway we got The Crow to watch last night, a movie I’ve of course heard much about but never sat down and watched. First of all I can see why its a bit of a cult favorite, it has this vibe and sense of mood about it (not to mention the tragic connection with Brandon Lee’s death). I was, however, quite struck with the overlap in feel with another of my favorite movies, The Matrix. It is listed as a connection/inspiration of the Wachowski’s, but I’ve never really seen much of a discussion of any large influence between the two. Of course the underlying genera are different, the science fiction feel of Matrix and the Horror/Vigilante-Revenge setup of Crow. But so much of the feel/gestalt of the movies struck me as familiar, even down to particular scenes and costuming. Of course the comic book connections and origins of the two could also be mentioned as a common point. In any case The Crow is a good entertaining watch for a slow weekday night.
Jul
20
2007
noosphere
Main Entry: noo·sphere
Pronunciation: ‘nO-&-”sfir
Function: noun
Etymology: International Scientific Vocabulary noo- mind (from Greek noos, nous) + sphere sphere
: the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution
And welcome to my newly born Meta-Cortex. I am finally taking the plunge and starting a wee blog of my own. Most all of my professional content will (eventually) be moved over and available on the static pages of this address. But, in a bit of a change for me, I do plan to offer quite a bit more personal content than I have been used to previously on my own web pages.
Where to begin. I’ll leave lengthy details to my About pages, for those really interested. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University here at the Commerce campus. I suspect, like many other blogs, that most of my personal content will tend towards, and generally be related under the broad category of Techno Geekry. I thought I might, just to kick things off and in no particular order, start with a standard old boring favorites list:
- Favorite Book
- Toughie. Like all academics I can imagine if I were that guy in the Twilight Zone episode, the last guy alive contemplating a life time of solitude in which to catch up on his reading, I too might be deliriously happy (not to mention my eyesight is 20/20 so no worries there). Should I mention Viktor Hugo’s “Les Misérables“, maybe pick Kelso’s “Dynamics Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior“, or perhaps along a similar professional line Hofstadter’s incomporable “Godel, Escher, Bach“? I think perhaps I’ll just settle on something simplier, but probably my all time favorite: “The Tao of Pooh” by Hoff
- Favorite Development System / Computing Platform
- Let see, I grew up hacking 6502 assembly and Basic on an Apple II computer. (I’ve recently been playing around with virtualization on my Fedora Core 7 laptop, I wonder if there are any 6502/Apple II emulators available?) I am pretty much a hard core Unix/Linux developer, Emacs editor, make system , subversion versioning kinda guy. I must admit, though, I sometimes truly pine for my days as a NextStep developer. Nothing yet has quite matched that feel of simplicity and power, especially the GUI development tools, sigh…
- Favorite Fiction Book
- I couldn’t really choose just one book, especially since I am a big fiction reader, mostly Science Fiction by nature. I grew up reading the classics, Heinelein, Sturgeon, Niven, Clark. Currently I am quite fascinated with so called post-humanist or singularity SF. Especially check out Vinge’s “True Names” for a great, and still possibly the best example of the genera. Stross is currently blazing away on my fiction radar. Get his “Accelerando” for what I consider his best so far.
- Favorite Movie
- Wizard of Oz, no wait… Godfather, no wait… Monty Python and the Holy Grail, no wait…
- Favorite Editor
- Favorite Scientist
- Favorite Color
- Blue, no yellow. aughhhh (c.f. favorite movie)