Fun Stuff > CHATTER
I'm really interested in like, "Board Theory" these days
Cernunnos:
Presently I am reading a very interesting if frustrating book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. This book is about a lot of things (it is quite long), but it mostly deals with the peculiarities and self-contradictions of logical systems. A really classic example of what he is talking about is the idea of a Strange loop. Hofstadter seems to try and describe each concept he finds pertinent in at least three or four ways in quick succession, if not simultaneously, mathematics (Gödel), visual art (Escher), and music (Bach) being the most obvious. Right now I'm only about 3/8" into the 2" thick book so there's only so much I can describe but at this stage I can recommend it heartily.
Tangentially related and also really interesting: godspeed used this weirdass loopy thing on one track off of F♯A♯∞ and it sounds really creepy.
David_Dovey:
--- Quote from: johnny5 on 02 Jan 2011, 01:19 ---this board seems to have its own way of talking/typing/accent. i can't place it right now without pulling up some good examples, but hopefully some of you know what i mean. other msgboards i'm on don't seem to have this, but maybe because they aren't as personal as this board (i'm guessing, with all the sex)
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Basically we're all trying as hard as we can to mimic the speech patterns of T. Rex and/or the characters of Achewood, in the main.
Johnny C:
--- Quote from: Cernunnos on 02 Jan 2011, 07:55 ---Presently I am reading a very interesting if frustrating book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
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huh, i was reading a david foster wallace interview from around the time he released his book about math (a book called everything and more: a compact history of ∞), and he said basically the exact same thing about the book you're reading, jon: that it's good but also that dude's ability to lay out his arguments is scattershot. in terms of pop-math books i want to read, there's dfw's and charles seife's books on zero and "proofiness." i'm so bad at math though, i'm probably just going to wind up reading jess walter's the zero instead and settle for "close enough"
Professor Snuggles:
--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 02 Jan 2011, 03:03 ---Man you know what I'm really interested in these days? The IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Completed on December the 18th at the Scott-Amundsen station at the south pole, it's the worlds largest high-energy Neutrino Observatory. 5160 seperate optical sensors buried up to two and a half kilometres deep in the antarctic ice shelf extend the limit of observable neutrinos up into the TeV range, allowing us to explore and understand high energy astrophysical processes that produce such neutrinos, and search indirectly for dark matter by looking for the remains of decaying weakly interacting massive particles, as well as forming part of earths supernova early warning system. Did you even know the world HAD a supernova early warning system? Well it does. Not to protect us from anything mind, but in order to give astronomers a pointer where to aim their telescopes. Neutrino emissions from a supernova peak several hours before the actual explosion (or rather peak photon emission), so you've got a bit of warning there. The other elements of SNEWS are the Borexino, Super-Kamiokande, Large Volume Detector and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Neutrino Observatories are pretty interesting anyway. They detect the Cherenkov radiation (sort of like a sonic boom, but with light) from the passage of a neutrino through a medium in which the speed of light is slower than the theoretical maximum. Ice and water generally. Cherenkov radiation is the thing that creates that terrifying ghostly blue glow around submerged nuclear reactors btw: cool stuff.
What cool things are interesting the rest of y'all right now?
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Y'know, that is actually really interesting. I think probably if you were to make a thread where the last line of your post was the thread title it would probably be pretty successful as a thread, because, like, I mean this is a pretty thoughtful group of people and I would be willing to bet they are interested in some pretty cool stuff.
Cernunnos:
--- Quote from: Johnny C on 02 Jan 2011, 09:08 --- i'm so bad at math though, i'm probably just going to wind up reading jess walter's the zero instead and settle for "close enough"
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Well, lucky for me, GEB doesn't have all that much real math problems in it, just logic problems that are constructed like math. it's a good thing too, at this stage i think my brain would implode if i had to do a simple long division problem. If this book had been this scattershot and also mathematically difficult i would have given up a week or two ago.
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