Beyond the Eternal Golden Braid

(2006 continued...)

Douglas R. Hofstadter: Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (An Interlocked Collection of Literary, Scientific, and Artistic Studies.

This is a collection of essays that first appeared in Scientific American. Hofstadter took over Martin Gardner's "space" in the magazine for a time. One thing that has really struck me is the difference in the writing represented by these columns and what appears in Scientific American these days. Another example of "dumbing down"? This is an amazing collection, a diverse collection of stuff ranging from typography to Rubik's Cube to Alan Turing to...well, see for yourself, look at the contents. Dense. Meaty. Thick. Well worth the effort. Twist your brain!

And speaking of twisting my brain, maybe I'll tackled Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize winning work again next year.

Made up of: Notes on the Cover; Introduction; Section I: Snags and Snarls (On Self-Referential Sentences; Self-Referential Sentences: A Follow-Up; On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures; Nomic: A Self-Modifying Game Based on Reflexivity in Law); Section II: Sense and Society (World Views in Collision: The "Skeptical Inquirer" versus "National Enquirer"; On Number Numbness; Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness; A Person Paper on Purity in Language); Section III: Sparking and Slipping (Pattern, Poetry, and Power in the Music of Frederic Chopin; Parquet Deformations: A Subtle, Intricate Art Form; Stuff and Nonsense; Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity; Metafont, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics); Section IV: Structure and Strangeness (Magic Cubology; On Crossing the Rubicon; Mathematical Chaos and Strange Attractors; Lisp: Atoms and Lists; Lisp: Lists and Recursion; Lisp: Recursion and Generality; Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics); Section V: Spirit and Substrate (Review of "Alan Turing: The Engima"; A Coffehouse Conversation on the Turing Test; On the Seeming Paradox of Mechanizing Creativity; Analogies and Roles in Human and Machine Thinking; Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Careenium? ; Waking Up from the Boolean Dream, or Subcognition as Computation); Section VI: Selection and Stability (The Genetic Code: Arbitrary?; Undercut, Flaunt, Pounce, and Mediocrity: Psychological Games with Numbers; The Prisoner's Dilemma Computer Tournaments and the Evolution of Cooperation); Section VII: Sanity and Survival (Dilemmas for Superrational Thinkers, Leading Up to a Luring Lottery; Irrationality Is the Square Root of All Evil; The Tale of Happiton; The Tumult of Inner Voices, or, What is the Meaning of the Word "I"?); Epilogue.

Counts as thirty-six (36) entries for the 2006 short story project.