Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid – Hofstadter is an incredibly dense read.  It’s light hearted and funny, but at the same time really really tough to read.

The book starts by talking of strange loops like:

[This statement is false]

And goes from there.

So, both these statements are true:

[I am reading the book]

[I am not reading the book]

This is no paradox depending on what you mean by ‘reading.’

Another entertaining loop from the book: asking the genie “I wish that you would not grant my wish”

A related paradox from How to Survive a Robot Uprising by Wilson, that I’m listening to in the car:

“Never show fear.  Robots have no emotion.  Sensing your fear could make the robot jealous and send it into an angry rage.”

Nice.

16 notes from hell.  After several unsuccessful Google searches for guitar tab for the intro in Final Six by Slayer, I used Audacity to slow down and loop the intro riff and figured it out myself.  Here’s what I heard…posted for research only… The guitar is tuned at least a half step down. Asterisks by the notes where I think the bass is playing over the guitar.

Eb-----------------------------------
Bb-----------------------------------
Gb----7---7-----7---7---7-----7---7--
Db------7---6*----5*--7---7-----7----
Ab--5*--------5-------------4--------
Eb-----------------------------------

Use audacity to clip tone
Save as mp3
Make sure under browsing options multimedia is turned on:  I had to do this after getting online, going to the browser menu, selecting advanced and it’s an option there to disable/enable multimedia
Send sound via xxxxxxxxxx@mms.att.net attached to email
Save from message on phone

or

Save on a website site
Send link via email to phone at xxxxxxxxxx@txt.att.net
Make sure under browsing options multimedia is turned on
save from site

Both worked for LG/att but http for ringtone with VM/kocyera, mms from my phone with attachment with jpg

The Equation that Couldn’t be Solved
How Mathematical Genius Discovered the language of symmetry
By Livio
http://www.amazon.com/Equation-That-Couldnt-Solved-Mathematical/dp/0743258215/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249502373&sr=8-1
 
A fascinating walk through the history of mathematics, Livio introduces group theory and shows its wide ranging applications.   He integrates the human stories of mathematical genius with descriptions of the theories being developed.
 
P8  Interesting off-topic  line “…This does not mean, however, that any delegation of visiting aliens would look anything like us.  Any civilization sufficiently evolved to engage in interstellar travel has likely long passed the merger of an intelligent species with its far superior computational-technology-based creatures.  A computer-based super-intelligence is most likely to be microscopic in size.” Someone has been reading Kurzweil.
 
P163 in describing operations and permutations, I was reminded of Wolfram’s a New Kind of Science.  Simple rules.  Identity, cyclic permutations, transpositions, inverse
 
P262 discusses possible characteristics of genius.  “Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.”

Beyond a certain IQ there is no clear correlation between intelligence and creativity.  For those that do make it into the roster of creators, a certain set of personality traits proves far more important than having a certain general IQ, or a high domain-specific ability, even one at prodigy. 

Creators are hard-driving, focused, dominant, independent risk-takers.  Complexity – tend to be able to harbor tendencies that normally appear at the opposite extremes.

The ability to think outside the box, stimulus freedom, break out of common assumptions.  Tolerance of ambiguity.

Planet Google by Stross
http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Google-Companys-Audacious-Everything/dp/141654691X
Table of Contents
Introduction

1. Open and Closed
2. Unlimited Capacity
3. The Algorithm
4. Moon Shot
5. GooTube
6. Small World, After All
7. A Personal Matter
8. Algorithm, Meet Humanity

Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

The book covers the history of Google, through both good and bad decisions.   Stross talks about Google’s branching out from its core technology of search.  Google book search continues to be a timely and controversial topic.

“Google gave users the chance to set up a ‘personal collection’ of book titles, which could be search and also shared with others. “  Look into this.

Dig back into Google earth – mentioned sites Virtual Globetrotting, Google Earth Hacks, and Google Sightseeing…virtual tourism.

A nice line from a Dresden Files book:

“Paranoid? Probably. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t an invisible demon about to eat your face.”
— Jim Butcher (Storm Front)

I’m listening to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an audio book.  I think this is a story that is extraordinarily entertaining “told” rather than “read.”

I’m not reading critically, trying to understand the satire, etc. but I am entertained by Huck’s wisdom.

For example: (from Google books)

“She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it.  But it warn’t so.  I tried it.  Once I got a fish-line but no hooks.  It warn’t any good to me without hooks.  I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work….  [Miss Watson] told me what she meant  – I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself.  This was including Miss Watson, as I took it.  I went out in the woods a long time, but I couldn’t see no advantage about it – except for the other people; so at last I reckoned I wouldn’t worry about it any more, but just let it go.”

Huck is a pretty practical guy.

Is God a Mathmatician, Livio- fin 6/09 – a guided history of mathematics and it’s intersection with philosophy and the title question. Livio is a great author making both history and mathematics easy and enjoyable to read about. His style reminds me of Simon Winchester who writes engaging stories of the history of such arcane and potentially dry topics as the Oxford English Dictionary. A couple of excerpts:

P114 The validity of the cosmological, teleological, and similar arguments as proof for God’s existence has been the subject of debate among philosophers for centuries.  My personal impression has always been that theists don’t need these arguments to be convinced, and atheists are not persuaded by them.

P140 and there-abouts, Livio discusses probability and statistics and I’m reminded of the great book Innumeracy, by Paulos.

P143 Scientists who try to decipher the evolution of the universe usually try to attack the problem from both ends….Probability and statistics are related in a similar fashion.  In probability theory the variables and the initial state is known, and the goal is to predict the most likely end result.  In statistics the outcome is known, but the past causes are uncertain.

The book ends with a general argument that mathematics is both discovered and invented by humans – god is and isn’t a mathematician.  He quotes Bertrand Russell in the end “Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.”  (from http://www.skepdic.com/russell.html). 

An enjoyable book.  For me,  mostly because of the history of mathematics presented.

“Don’t be evil,” says Google, but after reading Googling Security by Conti, I expect the temptations have got to be unreal.
 
I read on John Battelle’s blog that Google is now allowing users to change the information that comes up in “vanity searches.”  The price is that you must have a Google profile.  And the ranking of the “yous” will be affected by how complete your user profile is.
 
Google, and other online advertisers, expect to make money by knowing you better.  Google wants to know you really really well.
 
The implications are scary in a Big Brother, Hal, Skynet, AI sort of way.
 
As Conti points out repeatedly in his book, the more personalized the online service, the more you hemorrhage potentially sensitive information.
 
Alright, I am the REAL me, so let’s make sure I’m listed correctly on Google….  These friendly words appear on creating a Google Profile: “The more information you provide, the easier it will be for friends to find you.”  TO FIND YOU.  That’s sort of frightening in what’s left unsaid.  Like maybe not everyone is your friend?
 
And continuing the profile setup…”Your profile is not yet eligible to be featured in Google search results.  To have your profile featured, add more information about yourself.”
 
I wonder if you can turn this off later? Probably not.  And *never* on Google’s servers….  I got freaked out and stopped.
 
Right now YOU are the STRONG link in connecting your address, your phone, social security, and credit card numbers, your medical and family history, your credit record, how many traffic tickets you’ve received, your personal and your professional online profiles, like your “home” and “work” email accounts, and all the varied and “private” interests you’ve ever shared with the oracle of Google. 
 
The technology exists: it’s no stretch of the imagination at all to contemplate machine-based connection making. 
 
Richard K. Morgan is a science fiction author who does a brilliant job weaving tales of the near, and usually dystopic future.  In his novel TH1RTE3N, Morgan describes the AI-empowered n djinns that pull data from “the feeds” to make these sorts of connections.  As is typical with a lot of science fiction, the future is now and we’re helping Google to create it.

I finished Thirteen, by Morgan: Dystopic Future, genitically modified humans, Mars, cannibalism, what more could you  ask for?  Morgan is adept at creating a dystopic vision of the all-too-near future.  The issue of racism is recast here as a sort of xenophobia describing ongoing tension between “13’s” who are genetic variations of modern humans – essentially the original hunters in the hunter/gather equation – and their “femanized” descendents, us.  Morgan creates and fills out a whole mythology here and gives the moster a soul.  Brilliant book.