Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

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Ow.

Ow ow ow.

My brain hurts.

It’s a good kind of hurt, though. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is an exploration of everything from mathematics to the mechanics of thought and reasoning to Artificial Intelligence, all tied together and interrelated to each other. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

My big difficulty is that I am really not a math person, so whenever the chapters moved into that realm, I had to muddle my way through as best I could until he moved on to something else that I could comprehend more easily. I haven’t had to work this hard to read and understand a book in a long, long time — and I’ve got to say, I enjoyed it (though I did need to let my brain relax with a bit more light reading afterwards).

Some of the concepts are a bit dated, especially in the areas of AI — the book was first published in 1979, and there’s been a lot of progress since then — but the core concepts that he deals with are most likely the same that we’re dealing with today, just from more advanced positions.

Anyway, neat stuff — definite brain food.

Terrorrism of the future

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Here’s something interesting — a group called the Experimental Interaction Unit has created what they’re calling an “I-Bomb” (I’m assuming that the ‘I’ stands for ‘Information’). When activated, this I-Bomb creates an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) that destroys all electronic equipment, yet is physically harmless to structures or living beings.

Were units like these set to a high enough power output in the right locations, they could cause incredible amounts of damage, without having to physically harm anyone. Hints of terrorism to come?

‘I drank what???’

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It’s been a while since I did this, but two DVDs have come out recently that I knew I had to get, so I went ahead and splurged a bit before heading off to work. My most recent additions to my movie library are….

Legend: the last of the ‘three ‘L”s’ of fantasy from my childhood (the other two being Labyrinth and Ladyhawke) that I needed to pick up. While it doesn’t seem to be for everyone (I think that, like Star Wars, you need to have grown up with it to be as obsessed about it as I am, and seeing it for the first time as an adult doesn’t work as well), it has always ranked as one of my favorite films. Tom Cruise before he got mega-superstar-cocky, the gorgeous Mia Sara, and my all-time favorite Tim Curry role as Darkness, together with the visual splendor that Ridley Scott is so well known for (assisted by what must be a record for “most amount of glitter used in a motion picture”). Too cool.

Real Genius: one of my all-time favorite comedies of all-time — quite possibly my single all-time favorite comedy, in fact. A script that seems to be almost entirely a series of one-liners, all strung together with just enough plot to make it work. I really don’t know how many times I’ve seen this movie — and I’m always willing to watch it again. In the words of Chris Knight: “It’s a moral imperative.”

Incidentally, each of these movies has the distinction of having one of my first “movie star crushes” — Mia Sara in Legend, especially in the black dress given to her by Darkness, and Michelle Meyrink as Jordan in Real Genius. No real point to that fact — it just popped in my head.

ClearChannel sucks

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Listen to the radio much? I don’t — it seems there’s rarely anything worth listening to anymore. Why? Easy answer — ClearChannel owns a ridiculous amount of the radio stations in this country, and seems intent on driving them all down into blandness and mediocrity. The obvious conclusion: ClearChannel sucks.

(via DayPop)

Emperor of the US

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I first read about Norton I, Emperor of the United States of America in one of the Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. He was also mentioned in the book I’m reading now, The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy, by Robert A. Wilson. Quite the interesting — and very real — character, he declared himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. Lots more information about him in his archives — could make for some very interesting reading.

(via MeFi)

Music industry wakes up

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It’s about time some of the music companies started realizing that, cliched as the phrase may be, “if you can’t beat ’em — join ’em!” According to a story in the LA Times, Universal and Sony will be offering low-cost, unencrypted music downloads over the ‘net. Individual tracks for 99 cents, albums for $9.99 — and they can be freely (and legally) burned to CD once they’re downloaded. Hopefully it will work well enough that the other studios will follow suit….

Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy

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Conspiracy theories amuse me to no end. I think they’re silly, fairly ridiculous, and don’t believe a single one of them, though I do enjoy playing with them from time to time. However, a couple years ago I read The Illuminatus Trilogy, and by the time I was done, I was almost ready to believe every conspiracy theory out there. Great, bizarre, wacky stuff.

An online conversation got me remembering that, and so I picked up the companion volume, The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy. While not quite as good as Illuminatus, it was still much of the same style — bizarre, confusing, and entertaining, with a wonderfully twisted sense of humor throughout.

The only thing that would worry me would be if Wilson actually took any of this stuff seriously…which I’m thinking he just might, given the results when I do a search on his name on Amazon. I’m not quite sure what to think of that.

Faster than a speeding bullet

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Major benefit to having my own DSL connection: because it’s up 24/7, I can run this website out of my own house, off of an iMac I have here.

Major downside to my DSL connection: at the level I can afford to pay for, while my incoming speed is great (1.5Mbps, equivalent to a T1 line), my outgoing speed bites (128kb/s, about twice the maximum theoretical speed of a 56k dialup modem).

This has been bugging me for a while — while my outgoing speed is great for the majority of my site (text and graphics are small enough to transfer quickly), the .mp3 mixes I have available for download on my dj propaganda page take forever to download whenever someone decides to grab one. I was whining to Casey about this yesterday, and he pointed me over to a friend of his.

So, at this point, I’d like to give major thanks to Karim, who graciously let me use some space on dragonshed.org to host my .mp3 files. As dragonshed sits on top of an OC3 connection (155.52 Mbps — insanely huge pipe), anyone who wants my .mp3s will now be able to download them at the maximum possible speed of what ever line they are using to connect to the ‘net with.

So, I’m in the process of uploading all my mixes to dragonshed now. I should have them all transfered over to the new server by the end of the weekend. Thanks again, Karim!

(Update @ 12:48 am Saturday — they’re all transfered over now — woohoo!)