Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Well, Laura’s here, and we’ll be heading off to take me to the airport in the near future here. Then it’s off to Anchorage, to visit friends and see James and Stacy get married — woohoo!
If I manage to get any further posts up over the weekend, they’ll be from way up north somewhere….
I just found the Blogger’s Manifesto through a link on Doc’s blog. As one of the many people across the ‘net who are blogging, it’s both interesting and amusing — however, for various reasons, I don’t think I’ll be adopting it.
Well, I’ve got one more day of work ahead of me, then I’ll be heading back up to Anchorage for the weekend — woohoo! I currently have no clue quite how the weekend is going to work out…it’s definitely going to be interesting to see what happens. I know I’ve got the wedding on Saturday, but aside from that, things are pretty hazy. Guess I’ll just have to play it by ear and see how it all works out.
Last friday Chad, Rick and I went out to Polly Esther’s Culture Club, a 70’s/80’s-focused dance club down by the Space Needle to celebrate my 1 year anniversary. Neither Rick or I had been there before, so we figured it would be worth checking out. End result — fun place, and good music, but too expensive to become a regular habit ($10.00 cover!?). Made for an entertaining night, though, and will be worth stopping by from time to time.
The past couple days I got to spend some time when I was off work with Prairie, who I’d met through Yahoo! Chat some months ago. She goes to school out in Ellensburg, and as she had some free time between the end of college and her boyfriend returning to town, she came out to visit and see Seattle. Made for a fun few days, babbling about everything from Alaska to musicals to various books, and she let me borrow her copy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (the book that the movie Apocalypse Now was based on) to read — I’ll dive into that once I’m done with Gödel, Escher, Bach.
All in all, it’s been a good week so far. Tomorrow night Laura’s going to be coming out, we’re planning on hitting the Down Under to see a DJ she knows, then she’ll crash here so that she can give me a ride to the airport Friday morning. From there, it’s off to Anchorage — and on that note, it’s time for me to start packing!
To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
— Theodore Roosevelt
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.
While my TV situation doesn’t allow me to catch any of the games (even if I watched TV, reception here at my apartment is pretty horrible), I’ve been trying to keep an eye out for articles on the World Cup, and woke up this morning to a nice surprise — the US beat Mexico 2-0, and are advancing to the quarter-finals! Quite the upstart from what’s traditionally been one of the minor players in World Cup soccer. Go USA!
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?
Following up on a previous post, more troubling news about the blatantly unconstitutional detention of Jose Padilla:
The Justice Department, making its case in a closed meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the United States can hold Padilla until President Bush decides the war against terrorism is over…
In the committee briefing Thursday, government officials said that previous court cases, including a 1942 Supreme Court case, show that U.S. citizens can qualify as ‘enemy combatants’ — the legal term the Justice Department argues allows a person to be held without trial….
The Justice Department told the committee that the executive branch alone has the power to decide when a person qualifies as a combatant, an administration official said.
Now, I certainly don’t want to have a terrorist set off a “dirty bomb” — or any other type of bomb — anywhere. However, if there’s truly enough evidence to arrest Padilla, than he should be arrested and given a trial. Instead, however, an American citizen is being detained indefinitely in a blatantly unconstitutional move.
In the words of Tom Tomorrow:
There you have it, kids. By executive fiat, the Constitutional protections of American citizens are now officially contingent upon the whims of the President. So much for a nation of ‘laws, not men.’ I don’t care what your politics are. If you don’t find this deeply disturbing…well, I really don’t know what to say.
It’s official — Andersen is guilty of obstructing justice when they destroyed documents relating to the Enron debacle, and very likely won’t exist much longer. It was definitely interesting to be able to watch some of the downfall of Andersen from the inside for a while — and to see the final results as they come down the newswire. Neat stuff.
(via Blogdex)
An interesting piece from the NYT about just how drastically global warming — despite Bush’s insistance that it’s not a real worry — is affecting Alaska.
(via Daypop)