My commutes recently have been spent listening to Tony Hillerman’s Sacred Clowns, one of his Navajo Mysteries. Though it still works well as a mystery in its abridged audiobook form, it loses some of its flavor as a story, since many of the interesting details of reservation life are cut out in the interest of brevity.

I finished up The Emporer’s New Mind
yesterday just before getting home from work. It’s an interesting book. The
strongest argument against machine consciousness seemed to be that which relies
on Godel’s work in number theory. Godel proved that there are some statements
which are obviously true, but cannot be proven by algorithmic means. Penrose
asserts that since we can intuit that these statements are true without being
able to prove them, there’s something clearly non-algorithmic going on in our
thought processes. He goes on to appeal to quantum mechanics and some of its
interesting implications to demonstrate how this might work on a physical level
— the latter admitted conjecture, but intriguing
nonetheless.

Anybody want to explain to my how this works? Freaky.

Over the weekend, I finished A Fire on the Deep. It lived up to its promise — an epic story with a lot of fascinating details along the way. We also watched The Messenger, an interesting, visually compelling, disturbing account of the life of Joan of Arc. Finally, we particpated in a Passover meal, which was enlightening, though it would have been more so with child care.

I picked up my guitar for the first time in weeks today. It has been sadly neglected since we began this whole moving process. I serenaded the kids until it became painfully apparent that my left hand is in terrible shape, and that I should really be working up to playing for any length of time. Right now, my fingers on that hand are registering their protest by vibrating involuntarily — an odd feeling indeed. Oh well. At least I can still play pennywhistle.

Kathy and I watched The Winslow Boy last night. It’s a pretty good costume drama, with some great flashes of humor thrown in, but seems awfully underacted. Even when the main characters see enormous effort finally rewarded, they barely raise their voices. Still, a worthwhile 2 hours.

Since I’m spending a fair bit of time in the car driving to and from work, I stopped by the library yesterday to see what books on tape they had to offer. I was delighted to find a broad selection, including one that was on my reading list: The Emporer’s New Mind, a treatise on whether machines are capable of true consciousness. I started it this morning, and so far we’ve hit Turing and Hofstaeder, good starting points for the discussion. Looks like it will be a good listen. (Incidentally, I think abridging audio books is a crime that should be punishable by having to read “Atlas Shrugged” aloud. Twice.)

From Barry Brake in the midst of a discussion of postmodernism: And, speaking of ironic commentary, we Mac users relished the latest
Microsoft commercial, in which the written line “Where do you want to
go today?” is accompanied by a chorus belting out “confutatis
maledictis, flammis acribus addictis” [“the damned and accursed are
convicted to the flames of hell”], from Mozart’s Requiem.

I’m continuing the transition of my old website to this new one. I’m posting a mess of essays and stuff to the Message Board, so don’t be alarmed by the sudden influx of content. I’m not having brainstorm upon brainstorm, but am just rearranging the furniture.

One of the joys of moving to a new location for me is discovering the local programming on the new NPR station. The local station here is KUT, and one of the shows I’ve been enjoying in the mornings is Eklektikos. In spite of sounding like he has a bowl of milk and quaaludes for breakfast, looking downright cadaverous, and needing a hard consonant or two in his last name, John Aielli puts on a consistently interesting show for the music-lover. You can tune in to KUT here.