I have no idea how Google ranks images when you search for them using Google Images. For whatever reason I get a lot of klicks via the Google Images route. The most popular search search terms that lead to lispmeister.com are:

1. cigar
2. lego
3. calvin and hobbes
4. flea
5. barber
6. big cigar
7. lisp
8. emp bomb
9. theory of everything
10. mathematical

Mike asked for two new T-shirt designs. Unfortunately spreadshirt.com does not provide olive colored T-shirt stock in the US. I decided to use ash colored T-shirts instead. New suggestions for designs are always welcome.

I just finished listening to part 1 and part 2 of Robert Lefkowitz's talk The Semasiology of Open Source.

Computer source code has words and sentence structure like actual prose or even poetry. Writing code for the computer is like writing an essay. It should be written for other people to read, understand and modify. These are some of the thoughts behind literate programming proposed by Donald Knuth. This is also one of the ideas behind Open Source.

Robert is a very entertaining speaker and manages to convey some deep insights into the nature of software and our current location on the development curve of software literacy.

Here's a short biographical sketch about Robert Lefkowitz on O'Reilly Radar.

Calypso and Jennifer asked for Lisp Girl themed T-shirts. That was all the excuse I needed to create the shirts displayed above. Now, wouldn't one of them make a nice Christmas surprise for the geek you adore? [US shop] [DE shop]

Calypso and I went to a reading by Dietmar Dath from his newest book Die Salzweissen Augen. Dath is the author of the excellent Hoehenrausch - Die Mathematik des XX. Jahrhunders in zwanzig Gehirnen I mentioned here before. He is a good writer, but his new book is such a letdown. It's an epistolary novel. A sad retrospective with no positive vibe at all. Actually this is quite typical for the current vibe in German literature. Mixing autobiographical retrospective and analytical self indulgence. Depressing or as Calypso said: Fleischlos.

Just finished Woken Furies last night. Couldn't put it down once I started reading, so it was early in the morning, when I read the closing chapter. I'll just quote yetanotherbookreview.com:

Kovacs, as a protagonist, carries 'Woken Furies', as he carried his previous two books. He is a true anti-hero - he believes in no causes, is cynical and embittered and isolates himself. He is willing to kill without qualms if he feels the situation demands it. But despite this, seeing the world through his eyes allows us to deal with the crushing reality of this universe - a universe in which corporate violence and petty aristocratic rule is backed up with unstoppable military force; in which everyone else is ground under. Revolutions are not glorious and often do more harm than good. Kovacs has seen everything, literally, firsthand and from most perspectives. His cynicism is deserved.

Dr. Moira Gunn spoke with Richard Morgan about what he sees a society's future social issues [link].

Warner Brothers secured the film rights to Marke Forces.

I enjoy Ray's books most of the time, but the way he writes about Lisp in The Age of Spiritual Machines is just so wrong! Take page 70 for example:

Waiting for Real Artificial Intelligence

The 1980's saw the early commercialization of artificial intelligence with a wave of new AI companies forming and going public. Unfortunately, many made the mistake of concentrating on a powerful but inherently inefficient interpretive language called LISP, which had been popular in academic AI circles. The commercial failure of LISP and the AI companies that emphasized it created a backlash. The field of AI started shredding its constituent disciplines, and companies in natural-language understanding, character speech recognition, robotics, machine vision, and other areas originally considered part of the AI discipline now shunned association with the fields label.

This quote is just so wrong on so many levels it makes me sick. Does he really believe this? Is it because he founded one of the companies that suffered from AI winter, though he didn't use Lisp? I'm at a loss.

By the way, his closing chapter titled "How to Build an Intelligent Machine in Three Easy Paradigms" is really horrible. Recursion, neural nets and genetic algorithms? Come on, you can't be serious!

If I had to recommend a readable introduction on AI to anyone who's not a programmer, it would be the chapter on "Thinking Machines" in K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation.

Update:Thanks Paul F. Dietz, Jim Thompson and Nolan Eakins for pointing it out: it's Ray Kurzweil not Rudy Rucker who wrote "The Age of Spiritual Machines".

I've just finished reading the dead tree edition of Accelerando by Charles Stross. His vision of pre-singularity humanity is mind bending! His prose is compact and surreal at times. Here's a sample:

About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog - infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel - in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth's biosphere has been wrapped in cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every living human, a thousand million software agents carry information into the farthest corners of the consciousness address space.

Here's another nice quote:

"Don't be vile." Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards - a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law - the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It's not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her - that's what her grammar engine is for - or even that they're full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the solepurpose of owning chattel slaves.

The full text of Accelerando is available for download under a Creative Commons License.