Tuesday, March 12, 2002

The Illuminatus! Trilogy The Illuminatus! Trilogy  (Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson) "Feeling paranoid? Good: illumination is on the other side of absolute terror. And the only terror that is truly absolute is the horror of realizing that you can't believe anything you've ever been told. You have to realize fully that you are "a stranger and afraid in a world you never made," like Houseman says." Hoo hah what a great time I had reading this back in 1975!  If you enjoy the occasional conspiracy theory, this one tosses everything but the kitchen sink at you in a slapstick, no holds barred, Groucho Marx has just entered the building sort of way:  the Kennedy assassinations/OSS/CIA/Cuban/Mafia connection,  the Freemasons, quantum physics, reality tunnels, chaos and order, Yellow Submarines, Nazi ghost warriors, the Gnomes of Zurich  --  I could go on and on, especially with the entire f***ing text being right HERE. (7/11/02 - link is no longer valid. I can't find another place to find download it for free. BUY THIS BOOK!) I'm sorry but it gets me a little excited.  Screw that MP3 stuff!  A little 1.5 meg download and you'll have it too!  Is this a great universe, or what?  This little mind bomb will rattle around in your brain pan for years to come.  Co-author Robert Anton Wilson has written a lot of very interesting books in the ensuing years...  I found this link on the abuddhasmemes 'contextual infofilter' website.  As they pointed out, given the recent events of history, it might be an interesting time to reread this twisted little gem.  Why isn't Hollywood busting down the door to make movies out of this stuff?  11:18:25 PM    comment [] Point and Think Point and Think   (The Globe and Mail) Nice overview of how collaborative news filtering has come about, and about how it's being built on the ashes of now defunct or downsized Web magazines like Feed, Suck, and Salon...  Covers a lot of bases: blogging, the WickiPedia, Radio UserLand. 12:54:12 AM    comment [] A-Life Toys: Terrarium and Robocode A-Life Toys: Terrarium and Robocode Check out Terrarium -- a cool toy/corporate ploy, a hands on approach to learning some XMLvish Web servicesjibber jabber in a Microsoft® .NET Framework:  Run an ecosystem either in standalone or networked/peer to peer styley...  Build your own critters and turn them loose in digital ecosystems and see if they live or die.  There are screen shots and downloads at the link.  Looks like a neat way to acquire some programming smartology.  Oh, you can just plug into an ecosystem and watch the action.  What strange beasts are these, shuffling towards Bethlehem to be born?  I seem to recall a similar robot war styled game in Java from the nice folk at IBM/Java/Spumco consortium, where you built a robot in a Java environment and send it out to do virtual battle with other bots. . . Here it is:  "Robocode is a fun programming game that teaches Java by letting you create Java "Robots," real Java objects that battle it out onscreen against other robots. Robocode, with its snazzy graphics and hyper battles, is similar to a combination of Logo and CoreWars. While playing Robocode, you will learn how to write Java code, how to handle events, how to create inner classes, and more."  I played around with this one, modified some bots, played around.  There are worse ways to learn how to code.... 12:22:29 AM    comment []

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