"Turing"

[fiefoe]

Where the plot is going isn't too clear. A computer program ('The dream of a chip. I am Turing.') is offering a tutorial of computation - computer architecture, networks, operating system... I never realized that I used to know so much. More discussions on logic and computation take place at the end of book, footnotes disguised (?) as newsgroup email exchanges.

__ Both paradoxes stem from the use of the metalinguistic element "false" (or its derivative "liar" in the case of Epimenides) in a statement whose truth we wish to evaluate. .. Metalanguage and language make for an explosive mix.

__ That is, when fed with any program, our code loops forever if that program would halt if fed with itself as input. ... (Can you see how diagonal corresponds exactly to Cantor's argument? And to Russell's? Hint: Consider program halts as a table, what does diagonal do?)

<About Greece:>

• ...the hundreds of ingenious artifacts designed by Hero - the cobbler from Alexandria who was perhaps the world's greatest pre-eighteenth- century inventor
• A mathematician, had told Alexandros that the Aegean shoreline is so hauntingly beautiful because its fractal dimension happens to be equal to the golden ratio.
• The Romans called them Graeci, after the small tribe in Western Acarnania with whom they traded first. Grecs, Greeks, Grecchi, Griechen, Griegos, Grieki, Girisha. Only in faraway China did they call them their own name, corrupted by the distance: Hei-lap. Shi-la in Mandarin.

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