October 2006 - Posts
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I broke down and bought Kurzweil's latest book, "The Singularity is Near". I just had to. Have you ever seen this guy's credentials? Check this out from his site:
Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray has worked in such areas as music synthesis, speech and character recognition, reading technology, virtual reality and cybernetic art. All of these pioneering technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.
Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame , established by the US Patent Office .
He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.
I haven't done any of that.
But, I thought I'd give myself a little break and read something from someone totally different: Thomas Berry. This is from the Reverend's wikipedia entry:
Reverend Fr. Thomas Berry (born 1914) is a Catholic priest, cultural historian and ecotheologian (although cosmologist and geologian — or “Earth scholar” — are his preferred descriptors).
Among advocates of deep ecology and "ecospirituality" he is famous for proposing that a deep understanding of the history and functioning of the evolving universe is a necessary inspiration and guide for our own effective functioning as individuals and as a species. He is considered a leader in the tradition of Teilhard de Chardin.
Author Michael Colebrook describes two key elements in Thomas Berry’s thinking: “Firstly, the primary status of the universe. The universe is, ‘the only self-referential reality in the phenomenal world. It is the only text without context. Everything else has to be seen in the context of the universe’. The second element is the significance of story, and in particular the universe as story. ‘The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.’”[1].
Specifically, I've picked up a copy of "The Dream of the Earth". I figured reading both of
them would give me an interesting, if slanted, perspective. Slanted, because I suspect that they both express ideas that share similar fundamental structures. However, I'm also suspect every aspect of their facades will differ. Of course, that's just a guess. I've read the first third of Berry's book and only a single chapter of Kurzweil's.
In any event, they're just two among a stack of books on my floor here that I would truly love to read. I just don't have the time to spare. Tonight, in fact, I'll be back to studying my algebra. I'm not even certain if I'll take the time to add my latest to LibraryThing.
I'm hoping to get out this weekend and do some schrooming -- could be among the last good weekends for it. That, and maybe a little fly fishing.
I've been waiting to say this ever since I bought the book: I finished Decoding the Universe today and it only took a couple of weeks. 
What a ride. I've never read a more thorough exploration of the primacy of information theory. Seife made a compelling case (to a layman like me anyway)that information lies at the heart of the matter -- all matters.
His discussion of entropy changed my perspective on the subject. And his explanation of the role of the observer to understand some of the weirdness of relativity gave me one of those, however fleeting, "I kinda get that" sensation. (Sadly, those come and go.)
There's a lot of weirdness in science and Seife touches on a lot of it. Vacuum fluctuations, for instance, are about as bizarre as it comes. You have to wonder if they're not the result of some sort of sub-space super pressure exerted on our space-time by black holes where does all that information go.
This guy is good. I'm really going to have to read his other books: Zero and Alpha and Omega.
It's called the Short-stalked Suillus. I looks like this:
Photo from these folks.
Apparently it's part of a group of schrooms calls Slippery Jacks. In fact, that's the only part I feel especially confident about. It could be one or another Slippery Jack. Both are very common.
Anyway, these things are all over the Microsoft Corporate campus. They are supposed to be edible -- if you remove the slime. Not an appetizing proposition in my view, but then eating the mushrooms I've identified doesn't much appeal to me. I know food doesn't actually come from Safeway, but I prefer to pick it up there, or someplace like it. (I don't keep the trout I catch either.)
I'm working now on these monster white mushrooms growing out of my compost pile.
So I figure if Sodoku is good exercise for your brain, algebra should be at least as good right? I mean, especially if you sucked at math and science the first time around.
I think the answer is probably yes -- but not under all circumstances. For instance, it feels a bit awkward pulling out an algebra book to kill some time before my kid's soccer game starts. What's worse is that pulling it out is a public admission of a wayward youth for anyone that stops to consider it. I know they're thinking "yep, he must have been among those that hung around behind the school". I also find myself asking my 15-year-old -- pursuing something called an International Baccalaureate high school degree -- questions about factoring. He looks at me like I'm a dunce.
But, I have found some good sources and I am determined to get myself, slow but sure, up through calculus.
The Teaching Company: Algebra 1 and Algebra 2
Practical Algebra -- A Self Teaching Guide
Here's the spooky thing -- I complained about math and did as little as possible of it in high school. Now I really like doing it. Good thing too -- my 10-year-old is into math and is actually learning some of the same things I'm trying to re-learn on my own.
I've been hard at the meditation thing for several years now -- I want to recommend it to people, but it's a little hard to describe the benefits of sitting around doing nothing -- so I mostly keep it to myself.
Now this yoga deal is easier to praise. I've been doing a combination of Power Yoga and Bikram's for a few months. Here are the plusses:
- It's a great heart workout -- the heated room and pace of the class gets your heart pumping. I've been tempted to wear a monitor just to see how high it actually climbs. I'd bet around 90 percent of my max.
- It's great for flexibility (duh).
- It's wonderful for core strength (and balance -- well, you actually get a lot of the "core" benefits through the balance postures).
- It's humbling: I'm 48-years-old, balding, with a bit of rubbery softness around the middle, and the room is often full of people 20 and more years younger and in great yoga shape.
- It really is a "breath" exercise. I won't bother explaining that now -- maybe in another post -- but it compliments my sitting practice.
- It's different -- this is very big in my book. If it's not forcing you to do something you've never done before, you're not getting the maximum benefit from it.
Here are some downsides:
- I've been lifting weights for longer than lots of my fellow yoga classmates have been alive. That's left me with some inflexibility in my shoulders that makes something called "downward dog" a major pain the butt.
- You do have to be careful of your knees, some of the postures make significant demands on unsuspecting knees.
Here's a personal practical benefit that I can share. The balance work has so stabilized my knees and ankles (moreso by far than similar core/balance work I was doing in the gym), that I felt -- no kidding -- 20 years younger while descending a loose scree slope in the nearby Cascades (after climbing Silver Mtn.). I was able to balance better, experienced fewer mistakes (nobody's perfect), and I was better able to recover faster from those slips I did experience.
Another personal note: if you decide to give yoga a try, check out several teachers. They are not all the same. Make sure they tell you yoga is a breath exercise. It is. It should be taught that way -- IMHO. And you'll get more out of it if it is.
Here's where I attend: The Ashram Hot Vinyasa Yoga. It rocks.
Recently I referred a friend to several books on meditation. I couldn't decide which of the several -- okay, many -- books I've read on the subject I'd recommend, so I pointed to a bunch and recommended he look each over and decide for himself. I suppose I was hoping for a little serendipidy.
For me, each of the books, though not necessarily at the time I first read them, had some value. I still can't pick the absolute best, but I'm thinking Insight Meditation might provide the clearest discussion. It doesn't go into technique, but that's about the least important part -- I think. In fact, the Goldstein/Salzberg how-to, Insight Meditation, A Step by Step Course on How to Meditate, might be the best technique material I've found.