tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post8630646855519657125..comments2024-02-12T23:25:09.583-08:00Comments on Overweening Generalist: Poetry, Conversation, Translations, In-Form-a-Tion, Etcmichaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-8755628744925400712012-07-03T13:56:01.862-07:002012-07-03T13:56:01.862-07:00Someone gave you a Kindle? Wow. You've gone ov...Someone gave you a Kindle? Wow. You've gone over to the Dark Side? (I have a futile, tilting-at-windmills running war with reading non-dead tree books, which I'll elaborate on soon.)<br /><br />Sorry to hear about your father-in-law. I hope he makes a full recovery.<br /><br />Re: Sagan and pot: Lester Grinspoon (love the name!) of Harvard wanted to publish a book in 1970 called Marihuana Reconsidered. He drew upon mostly anonymous testimonies of people who found pot a positive force in their lives. One "Mr X" was included in his data. Written in 1969, here's Carl Sagan, stellar pothead:<br /><br />http://marijuana-uses.com/mr-x/michaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-4302290934324836122012-07-03T13:49:34.742-07:002012-07-03T13:49:34.742-07:00@Prof Wagner: You have neglected to tell me about ...@Prof Wagner: You have neglected to tell me about the Rebounding Jesus effect. Have at it, man!<br /><br />Indeed sombunall Unistatians have polyglot abilities, and many non-City-dwellars in the Euro Union are in mono. But Eng still seems the Linga Franca, ironically. I often ride my bike through UC Berkeley and overhear students talking to each other and it's usually Chinese these days. But I've heard French, German, things that may or may not be Italian, Arabic-sounding stuff, and non-German/non-French northern E. sounding stuff.<br /><br />There are some terrific passages in books about information theory that have influenced me, and many of them I derived from RAW mentioning them.<br /><br />But there's an old (1982) popularization of info that I still really like and think mostbunall who want an intro would like too: Grammatical Man, by Jeremy Campbell. See what you think. Info/entropy/language...<br /><br />For an interesting, sort of "conservative" take on information and "reality" I found Albert Borgmann really stimulating. His book was called Holding On To Reality.<br /><br />Three Scientists and Their Gods by Robert Wright: there's an audio talk on the Net of Leary riffing on this. Fredkin's ideas about info greatly infl. Kurzweil's. If you want to bone up on a close cousin of Jumping Jesus, read the first 110 pages of Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near. Wright also wrote a history of the "god" idea, and I remember RAW really liked his Non-Zero.<br /><br />Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, Power, by Ron E. Day (the name stuck with me). It's short, but dense, and talks about literature and info. Campbell's does too. He talks about the info-density of FW, smatterfact.<br /><br />I mentioned Gleick's The Information in my blog post. I have read a lot in it but have not read it cover-to-cover. It approaches the "magisterial," methinks. But I'm partial to potent generalizers. He makes info theory lucid for the interested layperson.<br /><br />Schrodinger's What Is Life? may be the starting point for erudite talking about info and the linkage between thermodynamics, biology, quantification and communications, etc. There's a version of it that came out in the 90s that includes Mind and Matter and some autobiographical tidbits from ES.<br /><br />In the last 20 years there's been an explosion of books that are very technical about info theory and library science and search, cellular automata, coding, chemical thermodynamics, complex network statistics, quantum processes, computability, etc. I have to develop a nose for finding the readable-for-a-generalist-stuff.<br /><br />In the 1960s there were a bunch of books that sought to describe esthetic preference in terms of info theory. I think that idea has become EMBEDDED in various thicker discussions of info theory.michaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-51942607107552032262012-07-02T11:47:18.162-07:002012-07-02T11:47:18.162-07:00Phew, I thought my first comment didn't post, ...Phew, I thought my first comment didn't post, and I couldn't remember what I said. I had forgotten that I saw Carl Sagan speak back in the 80's. I remember reading after he died that he loved smoking pot.<br /><br />So much to read. Thanks for the recommendation. I did just download Ulysses to my Kindle, and I read the first paragraph, my first Kindle reading experience. An acquantance kindly gave me the Kindle.<br /><br />Last night my father-in-law went to the emergency room. He felt better when we drove him home. While hanging out at the hospital I read a little of Faust Part II, Finnegans Wake, The Charterhouse of Parma and The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. That seems like a paradigm of my life right now.Eric Wagnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04312033917401203598noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-67935188269941257682012-07-02T09:56:59.335-07:002012-07-02T09:56:59.335-07:00Great blog as usual.
Many monolingual folk live ...Great blog as usual. <br /><br />Many monolingual folk live in Europe, and many polylingual folk live in the U. S. of A.<br /><br />Have I ever talked with you about the Rebounding Jesus effect?<br /><br />If want to understand information theory, what do you recommend I read and in what order? I had contempated starting with The Mathematical Theory of Information in, say, 2014, but I'd love some suggestions.Eric Wagnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04312033917401203598noreply@blogger.com