I'm back to Hofstadter. I'm about a third of the way through
Metamagical Themas: Questioning for the Essence of Mind and Pattern.
It's a compendium of columns he wrote for Scientific American over the span of a couple of years plus some commentary he added when he compiled them. While each column stands more or loss on its own, he's reordered them into several conceptual groups, all of which work to build on an overall discussion on the structure of human thought and the nature of creativity (which is Hofstadter's constant obsession, and what he feels is the key concept to pin down if we're ever to create true human-like artificial intelligence). Being a collection of columns, it's far less penetrating than
Goedel, Escher, Bach (dispite the comparable lenght), which is both good and bad. And he gets a tad preachy at points.
But what I'm really loving about this book so far is that it's a total product of its time. The columns were written between '81 and '82. he compiled them and wrote his post-scripta in '85. Here are a few of the more amusing things that have popped up:
* "Did you know that in some city centers, a single family home can sell for as much as
a quarter of a million dollars?!"
* "A really fancy single-user computer costs approximately $75,000"
* A column devoted to the inequity of sexist language. Including his pleasure that the term "flight attendant" is beginning to be used, and the resistance to the use of "Ms." as opposed to "Miss" or "Mrs."
* Mention of computers that can do an astounding 1 Million operations per second!
* A wholly unnatural obsession with Rubik's Cube, or "the Cube" as he often refers to it.
