Month: September 2008

  • Big Bail Out

    How is the big bail out supposed to work? The basic idea seems to be that the U.S. government will pay bad financial assets. Once these have been purchased, financial companies will know how much money they have. Right now, nobody will lend money, because they don’t know how much they should keep in reserve.…

  • Imperfect Storm

    I’m sure I am not the only person annoyed by the overuse of the phrase “perfect storm”. The phrase first appeared with the book and movie of that name, referring to a real storm in 1991. I lived in Massachusetts at the time, and it was indeed a notable storm for me, as a very…

  • Anathem

    I just finished Neal Stephenson’s new book Anathem. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The book is based on a lot of the Western philosophical tradition, albeit under different names. He provides an SF explanation for Plato’s Theory of Forms, which I think anybody has to appreciate, loosely (very loosely) based on some of Gödel’s…

  • A.I.G.

    The U.S. government has just now moved to bail out A.I.G. In this case it may not be a pure bailout: the government issued an $85 billion loan in return for warrants for 80% of the company. To put $85 billion in perspective, it’s the cost of the was in Iraq for eight months. So…

  • Syntax vs. Semantics

    Is consciousness a purely syntactic process or does it require semantics? That is another way of asking whether, if you take a snapshot of all the neurons in a human brain, and simulate it on a computer, the resulting program will be conscious. Computers are purely syntactic engines: they simply manipulate symbols. So if consciousness…