- A Clockwork Orange
- Brave New World
- Enders Game
- The Selfish Gene
- Epic of Gilgamesh
- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Neuromancer
- In the Beginning...was the Command Line
- Cry Engine demo was out early this week. Very demanding about GPU; but gorgeous graphics... Lovely tropical island look & amazing sea water.
- There will be stage building feature in Super Smash Bros Brawl (let's abbrev. it as SSB Brawl). Apparently there were earlier SSB 64 and SSB Melee. Some early pro gamer impression from the payable demo is that Brawl is completely different from Melee. (Sonic's in Brawl, btw.)
- Drawing can be seen as an organized activity to put what I see in my mind onto paper. Sometimes I feel it can almost be mechanized (put into a deterministic algorithm); but then even scratching a pencil line is ambiguous. Why 65.2937492873498237498 degrees instead of, say 65.33948290482340234980 degrees? Why 23.2348982309480 mm line instead of 25.2349239048209 mm one?
- Painting is somewhat similar. Only I can think in terms of patches instead of "blocks".
- Some people with too much time in their hands actually wrote a compiler for LOLcode. Sure LOLcats are fun; but writing a compiler for LOLcode seems rather extreme, no?
- Whoever says Perl scripting is dead needs to experience moar Perl. Many, many extensions on CPAN; some with really helpful manual.
- I found an evidence today that people do seem to agree that wisdom and intelligence/genius are mutually exclusive after certain threshold. Example: Kurt Godel is a genius, but he is certainly not wise. My colleague, Ian, told me a quotation from ADnD (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons): "When it rains, intelligence tells you that it is water falling from the sky; wisdom tells you to take cover."
From the book list, I have read these:
- A Clockwork Orange
- Enders Game (highly recommended; also "Now a Major Motion Picture!")
- Neuromancer
- In the Beginning...was the Command Line
"wisdom and intelligence/genius are mutually exclusive after certain threshold"
ReplyDeleteAh, 'threshold' may be the key, I haven't thought of it that way before. I've always thought of them being applicable to different areas or situations.
From my experience, the wisdom-pursuing part of me often tells me to not take certain things too seriously, as it gets me through life more happily =D; while the intelligence-pursuing part would insist that all those things be defined, analysed, and so on. Somewhat like what the rain example wants to say, maybe?
Well, at the beginning, I think wisdom and intelligence tend to agree. Take the rain example. Intelligence tells us that it's water falling from the sky; which means we will get wet; and we don't like getting wet; so let's run for shelter. In this sense, intelligence agrees with wisdom (though admittedly there is a possibility that intelligence overrides our disliking getting wet under the rain).
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the interesting find for me is that intelligence and wisdom ultimately force us to make a compromise (i.e. choose one and not the other). I used to think that we can attain them both.