So Gen X were slackers and Gen Y are kickin’ it? There are some nice statistics on Steven Johnson’s blog that show that our new Web medium is encouraging participation and entrepreneurship. Kids rule! —give them video games. And maybe Johnson is right in his tome “Everything Bad is Good For You” that this development has more to do with a generation that has grown up with interactive mediums (i.e. video games and the web) than a generation that grew up with a passive medium (i.e. television).

On a slightly related note, Mr. Johnson just came down here to Clemson to give the opening talk to the freshman class, who were required to read “The Ghost Map” over the summer as their first assignment as Clemson University students. I’ve seen Steven Johnson speak before up in New York, and his style (and level of nervousness) have really improved. I thought the points that he made about what went into the book were enlightening beyond the text, and from what I’ve gathered from the faculty here, there are quite a few students who now intend to go into sanitation engineering—you know, at least for the next 14 months or so. Freshman—you’ve gotta’ love ‘em.

I have to confess that I have not read “The Ghost Map” just yet—still slogging through Pinker’s Book (and being made fun of by the rest of the Psychology department for it). But even without reading it, I suspect it may be one of his better books. I’ve read them all, with the exception of said historical narrative, and the last two, Mind Wide Open and Everything Bad is Good For You had the information but not insight—the big insight. I don’t know how else to put that. Both Interface Culture and Emergence literally changed my world view. They influenced where I was heading with my own academic pursuits.

Let’s put it this way, great ideas are obvious after the fact. Once you see all the connections, it just becomes very obvious to you, that yes, this is the way things work or function. And I have to say that having worked with computer interfaces all my early adult life, I was still surprised when Johnson pointed out just how much influence the GUI had on society. It was astounding, and I think most people still don’t realize the impact. And it was equally astounding when he revealed how simple automatons could create immensely complex systems. I am still influenced by that particular work when I look at something like Danny Hillis’ Freebase.

Of course, Johnson isn’t inventing any of these theories or ideas. A lot of people complained in the case of Emergence that he really hadn’t explained the matter of emergence deeply enough. ((Although his critics all equally failed to explain what exactly they themselves were talking about)) But the critics really miss the point here, and it’s something he discusses in interface culture (somewhat) and discussed a great deal in his lecture. We live in a world of experts, and we need synthesists—people who don’t just understand the theories of the day, but that can reach across disciplines and what he calls the Long Zoom in order to pull these theories together and find revelations in the matrix of the information. I do think he generally accomplishes that. It would appear (from my mother and father’s reactions to the book) that he also did that with The Ghost Map.

My father is a mathematician here at Clemson, and I used to look at my father’s generation and think that we really needed more people like Steven Johnson, synthesists who would pull the data together. But something else that Johnson mentions in Emergence about the web has gotten me thinking slightly differently. My father’s generation really did need big visionaries who could see across wide swaths of disciplines, but this next generation, growing up on the web—they all have that ability already. Granted, watching them use Facebook in the library, I’m not particularly given over to a utopian optimism about the future of science, but you have to think that the nature of an interactive medium in the lives of these young scientists is going to make them a lot more aware of what is going on elsewhere in their discipline and in science in general. And that will make them synthesists inherent.

This post is part of Banapana’s [running bibliography](/references).

This post is part of Banapana’s running bibliography.

Links to Text

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Amazon Link

Amazon Review

Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think.

Hofstadter’s great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and ‘strange loops’) accessible and remarkably entertaining. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Allusions to Bach’s music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher’s continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.

The world has moved on since 1979, of course. The book predicted that computers probably won’t ever beat humans in chess, though Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. And the vinyl record, which serves for some of Hofstadter’s best analogies, is now left to collectors. Sections on recursion and the graphs of certain functions from physics look tantalizing, like the fractals of recent chaos theory. And AI has moved on, of course, with mixed results. Yet Gödel, Escher, Bach remains a remarkable achievement. Its intellectual range and ability to let us visualize difficult mathematical concepts help make it one of this century’s best for anyone who’s interested in computers and their potential for real intelligence. –Richard Dragan

Throughout the twists and turns of this caper you are constantly meeting the good citizens of New York, a sikh who is upset to be mistaken for an arab, a brooklyn construction worker who can identify Albanian, his ex-wife, an Albanian who will translate for traffic ticket relief, and more. The characters are all chock full of character and rather than dominating the landscape it makes you wonder where these people are in other movies about New York. Personally, having lived in New York for seven years i felt more at home with this portrayal of the city than any other I’ve seen.

“So why do it?” I kept asking. Here’s a pretty typical heist movie with an atypical take on the so-called spear carriers. The big guys, the mayor, the bank owner, his amoral “cleaner” Jodie Foster, are up to their necks in shit frankly, and I think this may be the real point of “Inside Man” and perhaps a second meaning for the title. The real inside men, the real crooks are all the fat cats who run the show and are pretty much always ripping off the victims or the little people.

I don’t have much more than a hunch on this theme other than the fact that Christopher Plummer’s character, the bank owner, when confronted about stealing from holocaust victims says something about how “they”–american coporations–all did it. I don’t doubt a lot of them did. Other than that there is the fact that the robber gets away and comes off pretty clean having gone out of his way to insure that none of the hostages are harmed. But to me, the tone of the movie just seemed to lean toward this interpretation.

Besides the absurdity of the “raid” and the fact that the police did not arrest the makers or distributors, but rather the close-to-minimum-wage employees, you really have to ask about the monetary outcome. I know Kim’s Video and I can promise you that 95% of their clientele don’t listen to the radio, don’t like mainstream music and very likely wouldn’t have purchased an album from that aforementioned Sony musician. They were looking for something eclectic, something different from Pop or R&B, something of a collage or maybe a riff.

Nobody wins in these kinds of legal battles. This is not copyright infringement as Rip, Burn, Sell. This is copyright infringement as Rip, Re-mix, Add and Sell. These “crimes” are different. One takes music as a commodity and just sells it at a cheaper price. The latter approaches music as art and tries to weave something new. We have to find a way to get typical corporate-types to stop viewing their intellectual property as some dead-on-a-disc commodity. New art flows from old art and I’m really starting to think that this same Sony jerk who told on Kim’s would’ve done the same to a good jazz musician in the 40′s who quoted a riff from a Sony artist.