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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…
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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…
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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…
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Pakistan
There was a pretty good article about Pakistan in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It was mostly about the relationship between the Pakistani government and the Taliban in Pakistan’s northwestern province. It didn’t say anything terribly new, but I found it helpful to see everything laid out. I’ve never been to Pakistan, but from…
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Web Advertising
Display ads on the web seem to be in something of an arms race (display ads are like the ones on the right side of this post; they are not the same as search ads, which you see when you do a web search). People browsing the web get better and better at ignoring display…