Whoops, yes. Not sure why Hubert Dreyfus popped into my head. What you say in point 3 is not my recollection of Godel Escher Bach, but it has been about six years since I last read any of this stuff so maybe I'm just all kinds of screwed up in my memories of it.

Now I'll have to go look.

I almost picked up a more recent work by Hofstedter, but it took me eons to get through GEB, so I wasn't really in the mood to keep on that track. Quintet is significantly more contemporary (1998). It's a little bit more on the popcorn side, but has some interesting perspectives.

Now that sounds great (somehow I missed it when last in a phase of reading on this topic though it would have been relatively new when last I was doing so) and I've already ordered it from Amazon.

On a side note, can you imagine the hubris necessary to set out to write about a book that not only presents famous intellectuals as characters but tries to actually accurately present the thought processes of five of the greatest minds of the 20th century? It's good hubris, but certainly hubris I don't have.

If it's good enough for Plato...

True, but with Plato there is no way to know if he did it well or accurately. This guy probably had every historian of science and philosophy prepared to jump down his throat over the slightest gaffe.

Being disgraphic I have always been fascinated by speech recognition software.

Current off the shelf Speech to text technology using pattern recognition not individual learned dictionaries has stalled out with anywhere from 90% to 95% accuracy their 98% claims are bulsh. I believe IBM no longer is developing for its’ product and dragon dictate who originally broke past the initial limitations is out of business I hear.

I thought when I first started messing around with the technology in the disability centers computer lab at Northridge that it would get: better, cheaper and become regular embedded hardware. I actualy thought this will become completely ubiquitous, then again I guess that people don’t see the value in talking to their toaster. I talk to my rice maker sometimes... And it sings twinkle twinkle little star back to me. Must be that fuzzy logic.

We wouldn't give you that much credit :D

Or that much crack :)