Clever. Anyone who has read Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach will recognize this as a crab canon. Well done!

>> ^shuac:

Very meta. Someone get Charlie Kaufman on the phone.


Douglas Hofstadter

Seriously great documentary!

If your interested in this one, you could maybe try and read "Godel, Escher Bach" by Douglas R. Hofstadter.. Great and almost too complicated book.. Thanks for the upload!

OK, so I'll make a list now, and then read everybody elses and see if it reminds me of other books that really stick with me

1 Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter
2 1984 - George Orwell
3 A Deepness In The Sky - Vernor Vinge
4 Interview With A Vampire - Ann Rice
5 Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - Katie Hafner and John Markoff
6 The Tuning of The World - R. Murray Schafer
7 The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
8 National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe - Roy A. Gallant and Margaret Sedeen
9 The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine - Rudolph Chelminski
10 The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - Michael Pollan

OK, read others' and realize that I should have put Dune, for sure. I'm glad to see I'm not the only Hofstadter fan, and thrilled to see another Vinge on the list.

I feel kind of weird to have 1984 and Interview with a Vampire on my list. 1984, just because it really did stick and resonate, and well... I've probably read IwaV a few dozen times. Back in junior high I read it almost monthly.

I actually was considering putting The Star Wars Sourcebook by Bill Slavicsek & Curtis Smith on my list. That book blew my mind when I was young, and it definitely will always have a special place in my heart. Now that I look at a picture of the cover on Amazon, I wish that I had. Such an awesome book.

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Dune - Frank Herbert
Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut
Live from Golgotha - Gore Vidal
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller


Those are 10 off the top of my head, in no particular order. Some I consider favorites, others made a strong enough impression that they always come to mind when someone asks a question like this.

I'm just going to keep adding to my list as I remember them. And I don't know how I could have forgotten one of the most important books of the 20th century, and one that quite literally changed my life:

Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter


This book is not for the feeble-minded.

Noyce! If you think this is clever you should check out the Crab Canon from my most favourite book in the world Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadetr.

Crab Canon
----------

Achilles and the Tortoise happen upon each other
in the park one day while strolling.

Tortoise: Good day, Mr. A.
Achilles: Why, same to you.
Tortoise: So nice to run into you.
Achilles: That echoes my thoughts.
Tortoise: And it's a perfect day for a walk. I think I'll be walking home
soon.
Achilles: Oh, really? I guess there's nothing better for you than walking.
Tortoise: Incidentally, you're looking in fine fettle these days, I must
say.
Achilles: Thank you very much.
Tortoise: Not at all. Here, care for one of my cigars?
Achilles: Oh, you are such a philistine. In this area, the Dutch contribu-
tions are of markedly inferior taste, don't you think?
Tortoise: I disagree, in this case. But speaking of taste, I finally saw that
Crab Canon by your favorite artist, M.C. Escher, in a gallery the other
day, and I fully appreciate the beauty and ingenuity with which he
made one single theme mesh with itself going both backwards and
forwards. But I am afraid I will always feel Bach is superior to Escher.
Achilles: I don't know. But one thing for certain is that I don't worry about
arguments of taste. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Tortoise: Tell me, what's it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no
worries at all?
Achilles: To be precise one has no frets.
Tortoise: Oh, well, it's all the same to me.
Achilles: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know.
Tortoise: Say, don't you play the guitar?
Achilles: That's my good friend. He often plays, the fool. But I myself
wouldn't touch a guitar with a ten-foot pole.
(Suddenly the Crab, appearing from out of nowhere, wanders up ex-
citedly, pointing to a rather prominent black eye.)

Crab: Hallo! Hullo! What's up? What's new? You see this bump, this
from Warsaw - a collosal bear of a man - playing a lute. He was three
meters tall, if I'm a day. I mosey on up to the chap, reach skyward and
manage to tap him on the knee, saying, "Pardon me, sir, but you are
Pole-luting our park with your mazurkas." But WOW! he had no sense
of humor - not a bit, not a wit - and POW! - he lets loose and belts me
one, smack in the eye! Were it in my nature, I would crab up a storm,
but in the time-honored tradition of my species, I backed off. After all,
when we walk forwards, we move backwards. It's in our genes, you
know, turning round and round. That reminds me - I've always
wondered, "which came first - the Crab or the Gene?" That
is to say, "Which came last - the Gene, or the Crab?" I'm always
turning things round and round, you know. It's in our genes, after
all. When we walk backwards we move forwards. Ah me, oh my!
I must lope along on my merry way - so off I go on such a fine day.
Sing "ho!" for the life of a Crab! TATA! Ole!

(And he disappears as suddenly as he arrived.)

Tortoise: That's my good friend. He often plays, the fool. But I myself
wouldn't touch a ten-foot Pole with a guitar.
Achilles: Say, don't you play the guitar?
Tortoise: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know.
Achilles: Oh, well, it's all the same to me.
Tortoise: To be precise one has no frets.
Achilles: Tell me, what's it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no
worries at all?
Tortoise: I don't know. But one thing for certain is that I don't worry about
arguments of taste. Disputandum non est de gustibus.
Achilles: I disagree, in this case. But speaking of taste, I finally heard that
Crab Canon by your favorite composer, J.S. Bach, in a concert the
other day, and I fully appreciate the beauty and ingenuity with which
he made one single theme mesh with itself going both backwards and
forwards. But I am afraid I will always feel Escher is superior to Bach.
Tortoise: Oh, you are such a philistine. In this area, the Dutch contribu-
tions are of markedly inferior taste, don't you think?
Achilles: Not at all. Here, care for one of my cigars?
Tortoise: Thank you very much.
Achilles: Incidentally, you're looking in fine fettle these days, I must
say.
Tortoise: Oh, really? I guess there's nothing better for you than walking.
Achilles: And it's a perfect day for a walk. I think I'll be walking home
soon.
Tortoise: That echoes my thoughts.
Achilles: So nice to run into you.
Tortoise: Why, same to you.
Achilles: Good day, Mr. A.

In 1996 an ambient compilation came out on EM:T records called EM:T Explorer that had a track that exploited this same effect. The last track on the 1st CD was called Endlessly Downward and by an artist Beatsystem, and featured a 12 second loop repeated for 3 minutes and some odd seconds. So awesome.

The effect, though, is not new. As mentioned in the wiki page, bach utilised this effect as well. Everybody whose mind has just been blown? Go and read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter.

I have so many questions about this! Was he playing the karaoke version backwards to sing along with? Does his normal, forwards voice have such a distinct accent?

In either Le Ton Beau De Marot or Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter writes at length about his efforts when he was younger to learn to speak reverse English fluently and without an accent. To be sure, there are certain sounds that are impossible to replicate naturally, but if I recall correctly he wrote that with much practice, he was able to get the accent correct for a lot of words/phrases, etc.

Thinking more about it, I'm almost certain that it was in Le Ton Beau de Marot, because he gets pretty heavily into accents for a few chapters. What does a person speaking german with a french accent sound like? What does a person speaking Italian with a Japanese accent sound like? Etc.

Great clip.

This is taken from The Singularity Summit symposium hosted by Stanford University, where a good number of speakers about this topic gave keynote addresses. My goal was to have them all posted in the same place, in order for people to easily find them, and I was in the process of doing just that, but due to the queue, Sunkid got to this one first. Here's the rest of the info I already had prepared to go along with this.

--------------------------------------------------

Eliezer Yudkowsky - The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion (Full Title)

The Singularity Summit symposium hosted by Stanford University was a series keynote addresses given with the purpose of addressing the very real implications that the Singularity may hold in the near future in an academic setting, and (without being too melodramatic on my part) to question what the very fate of the human species may be in the 21st century.

--------------------------------------------------

Here are the rest of the keynote videos that go along with this, in the order that they were given at the event.

Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity: A Hard or Soft Takeoff?
http://www.videosift.com/video/Ray-Kurzweil-The-Singularity-A-Hard-or-Soft-Takeoff

Douglas R. Hofstadter - Trying to Muse Rationally about the Singularity Scenario
http://www.videosift.com/video/Douglas-Hofstadter-Musing-Rationally-about-the-Singularity

Nick Bostrom - Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risks
http://www.videosift.com/video/Nick-Bostrom-Artificial-Intelligence-and-Existential-Risks

Sebastian Thrun - Toward Human-Level Intelligence in Autonomous Cars
http://www.videosift.com/video/Sebastian-Thrun-Human-Level-Intelligent-in-Autonomous-Cars

Cory Doctorow - Singularity or Dark Age?
http://www.videosift.com/video/Cory-Doctorow-Singularity-or-Dark-Age

K. Eric Drexler - Productive Nanosystems: Toward a Super-Exponential Threshold in Physical Technology
http://www.videosift.com/video/Eric-Drexler-Productive-Nanosystems

Max More - Cognitive and Emotional Singularities: Will Superintelligence come with Superwisdom?
http://www.videosift.com/video/Max-More-Will-Superintelligence-come-with-Superwisdom

Christine L. Peterson - Bringing Humanity and the Biosphere through the Singularity
http://www.videosift.com/video/Christine-Peterson-Humanity-Biosphere-the-Singularity

John Smart - Searching for the Big Picture: Systems Theories of Accelerating Change
http://www.videosift.com/video/John-Smart-Systems-Theories-of-Accelerating-Change

Eliezer Yudkowsky - The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion
http://www.videosift.com/video/Eliezer-Yudkowsky-The-Intelligence-Explosion-and-Humanity

Bill McKibben - Being Good Enough
http://www.videosift.com/video/Bill-McKibben-Being-Good-Enough

Ray Kurzweil - Stanford Singularity Summit: Closing Thoughts
http://www.videosift.com/video/Ray-Kurzweil-Stanford-Singularity-Summit-Closing-Thoughts

This is great. I agree with his sentiment- the need for more debate with futurists and singularitatians. Funnily enough, I actually send Hofstadter an email in 2004 and he sent me a copy of the chapter that he had written for a book to be published by the oxford university press. It's great that he is still thinking and speaking about this topic, and basically saying what I expected him to say: "Calm down! You guys need to have more critical minds looking at this"

He asked me not to share his response, as the book was at that time yet to be published, but my question to him was thus:

Greetings Professor Hofstadter,

I'm a fan of yours, and not currently an AI researcher, for some reason that is outside the scope of this email.

I read GEB:EGB compulsively in highschool and have since bought 6 copies and given them to many friends. I've also read Metamagical Themas many times, and your magnificent Le Tombeau De Marot. Several years ago, I discovered a crackpot who claims to be a fan of yours by the name of Eliezer Yudkowsky, spouting off at great length about the forthcoming Singularity. The subject has captivated my imagination, despite its trappings of fanatacism, and I've luckily discovered slightly less crackpot adherents since that time. In particular I find Ray Kurzweil and Hans Morevac convincing.

I am very interested to know what your thoughts are on the singularity, and if you think that predictions of an asymptotic ascension of technology in our near future are realistic.

I suppose I shouldn't assume that you are familiar with all of this 'crazy-talk' so here are a few links:
http://yudkowsky.net/singularity.html
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

If you have any comments, or better, if you have written any articles concerning this subject, I'd very much like to read them.

this video jumped out at me because one of my favourite books is by Douglas Hofstadter (didnt know who he was though), it's called
Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid. opened my eyes to certain things about the universe.
anyway, this talk starts off a bit boring but gets a little more interesting about halfway...