March 28, 2003
war stuff

INTEL DUMP is very informative and coherent, if longwinded.

Where is Raed? is good from the other side of the guns.

Posted by dpassage at 03:12 PM
March 16, 2003
Look how clever I am

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. By Douglas R. Hofstadter.

It took me probably three or four years to get through this book; it's very dense, with puns and whatnot scattered throughout. I found myself stopping to reread passages, trying to pick up on the many meanings.

The main thesis of the book appears to be that just about any natural process can be simulated with a defined-state Turing machine, via number and computational theory, Gödel's Theorem, and several other things.

Unfortunately, the march of time has passed him by; chaos theory and fuzzy logic have pretty much shown that some neurological processes can't be accurately simulated on a Turing machine, at least not in any reasonable amount of time.

But, whatever. He takes his many disparate subject areas and ties them into a coherent hole; that's pretty impressive.

Posted by dpassage at 05:20 PM
all booze all the time

Farewell, My Lovely. By Raymond Chandler.

Man, these people can drink! A martini here, scotch and soda there, soon you're talking real alcoholism.

Still, a great mystery novel, even if the resolution is a bit trite.

Posted by dpassage at 02:06 PM
March 07, 2003
don't eat the crayons

Slightly out-of-context line of the day:

"Everything [Bush] knows about foreign policy, he learned in kindergarten."

Posted by dpassage at 10:37 AM
March 06, 2003
travel woes

Orbitz has much better hold music than United.

But then, Orbitz's phone system just hung up on me.

Posted by dpassage at 06:44 PM