I recently watched Thank You For Smoking. To my surprise, it was an excellent movie. It was a well-acted, witty satire of American politics, with none of the boring proselitizing that one might have expected from the title. Then someone mentioned that Christopher Buckley’s book of the same title was better. Having now read the […]
I have recently had the opportunity to read two extremely bad books.
First, about Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. Let me start off with saying that every (and I am not exaggerating, absolutely every) time that the book included a technical detail that I was familiar with, the book got it wrong. Things like Lenardo da […]
Stanisław Lem, one of the world’s greatest science fiction writers, died on Monday March 27. And I had just started reading the Cyberiad last week…
(Which, by the way, at least in my translation, is an utterly brilliant work. The Dragons of Probability in particular will leave anyone who has ever taken a quantum mechanics course […]
Studio Ghibli is making a film based on Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series. The English title is Tales from Earthsea (the Japanese Gedo Senki means something like Ged’s War Chronicle). Apparently, it will be based mostly on the third book of Earthsea (The Farthest Shore). And, if you read the director’s blog (well, its English […]
First, I am finally back on the East Coast; however, updates will still be infrequent because I need to prepare for exams.
Second, I read Euclid’s Window by Leonard Mlodinow, a book that I found lying on my parents’ dinner table. The book is five stories, loosely tied together by discussions of Euclid’s Parallel Postulate. The […]
Peter Seibel has written a book called Practical Common Lisp, which is available in dead-tree form for money or online for free. From what I have seen, the book is excellent, to put in mildly. It shows how to get the most out of Lisp’s functional nature, and how to harness that power for everyday […]
And by “strange”, I mean “clinically insane”. If you have any doubts, just look at his 1978 essay. Quoth PKD:
My theory is this: In some certain important sense, time is not real. Or perhaps it is real, but not as we experience it to be or imagine it to be. I had the acute, overwhelming […]