Karin and I just watched Big Fish - Tim Burton's latest film. Now, I'm not a *huge* Burton fan - I didn't like Sleepy Hollow at all. I own Batman, as well as The Nightmare Before Christmas, but I'm well prepared to not like a Burton film. But this one is likely to supplant Nightmare as my favorite Burton film. It's really good, and the setting of the South only helps him drive home his visuals, while still being something I can accept in a "real" framework. We rented it from Netflix, but I'll buy the DVD in the next week or so. It's really good. If it's not available in Japan, I'd be willing to export a copy, it's that good. :-)

This album (iTunes link) rawks, hard. It's classical pieces, redone as Electronica tunes. I'm still downloading it, but I've listed to Fur Elise, Habenara, and the iTunes preview of Ave Maria and Night on Bald Mountain. It's sweet! Oh, and it was a good time to authorize Kool-Aid on the iTunes tip :-) (Confidential to Nutty Ninja in Nihongo - OK I lost the the Kool-Aid wallpaper, settling for my HD icon and machine name. Now I'm back to a shot I took two years ago when driving down to E3 on 101. Indeed, it's a shot from the very first posts on this blog - when I was using CityDesk)

So astute analysis of my blog would note a distinct lack of book commentary over the last few months. There's a very good reason for that, which if you all settle down in nap position, maybe Unca Tim will say on. I read Godel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. It's a really good book and I'm glad I've read it, but it has been my only non-magazine reading material for six months or so. It's DENSE - I was lucky to read one chapter a weekend. It's hard to say whether I'd recommend it though - I think you need be a pretty logical thinker and interested in the field of AI. And when I say "pretty logical thinker" we're talking mathematician or software engineer. A lot of the book is formal mathematical proofs, which take a certain careful and pedantic approach to process. This is reall a shame because it has a lot of inside that is very artistic, and valuable to art folks - but I don't think many of them will slog through the math-think. The connection between the three individuals named (Spoiler alert, I guess :-)) is in the author's view these three individuals all incorporate "strange loops" or self-references into their works. Godel proved number theory was incomplete, by making a statement *IN NUMBER THEORY* that said it could not be proved in number theory. Escher had hands that drawselves, halls of mirrors, and stairs that went up in order to meet themselves coming down. Bach used many little tricks in his fugues to play on the structure of the piece itself, playing the them upside down, inverted in time, and so-forth. Hofstadter goes on to postulate that the heart of consciousness is such a "strange loop" - that human brains can build models of the world that *include* themselves. We can't do that in code, but maybe being able to do so is key in being conscious. Anyway, it's great, but a difficult slog. After that I took a literary vacation and read Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and Bruce Sterling's The Zenith Angle. This weekend I started Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene which is quite good, and a much faster/easier read than GEB.