Light Reading

Between the end of my work at Stanford and catching the CalTrain to see the House Jacks, I had a couple of hours to hang out. I decided that Palo Alto is a nicer place to chill than Redwood city, and wound up in the Stanford bookstore. I found a comfy chair in a corner of the basement, and read the first couple of chapters of each of several books.

• Martin Gardner’s Did Adam and Eve Have Navels. Fun and light. A series of articles on pseudo-science.
• The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch. This is a fairly weighty tome that starts with the assumption that the person we are and the first person experience we have is inextricably tied up with our body and the structures and biochemistry of our mind. This leads them to dispense (in the introduction, even) with mind/body dualism, as well as with the classic struggle between man’s “animal” and “rational” natures. There was an early line that went something like: ‘Rationality, rising from the flesh, cannot transcend it.’
• Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. Turing (for the non computer geeks in the audience) was one of the most brilliant mathematician / computer scientists ever to live. He worked on decoding the German “Enigma” machine, proved various things about computation that are still the foundation of theoretical computer science today, pondered whether machines would ever “think,” and eventually killed himself when his homosexuality became widely known. He’s one of the giants of my field, and the biography seems fair and even-handed. I was well underway to making this my purchase of the day, when I found the following couplet (written by Turing to a friend shortly before he killed himself) that depressed me so much that I put the book back:

  Turing says that machines think
  Turing lies with men
  Therefore machines do not think

• Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. I wound up buying this one. I love popular science renditions of subjects that I just don’t understand. This one is about space and time and, basically, everything.

Between every few chapters (since I really wanted to take a nap), I would lean my head back and shut my eyes for a bit. It was one of the most relaxing afternoons I’ve had in a long time.

Now, however, I’m at the Berkeley physics labs, hanging out with amnesiadust. Woot.