Sunday, December 19, 2004
... used to be my favorite author, but it just took me two plane flights and an entire sunday to wade through 927 very wide pages of the first book of the baroque cycle, and I'm exausted and resentful from the effort.
I do often find myself fascinated by the same sorts of things as he, and that's why, maybe in a month or two, when I recover, I'll tackle the next book in the series, but it's more of an exercise in self torture than actual interest in the plot or characters.
Reading Stephenson's books always sparks me into reading some of his fascinating original references, Cryptonomicon, for example, caused me to read the autobiography of the german Admiral Donitz, which was the best book about the Atlantic war I'd read in many a year; it enlightened me considerably.
"Real Character" - a language invented by one of Newton's contemporaries - fascinates me. Lately I've been struck by how limited the English language is. Given how discerning an eye can be, we seem to have bandwidth-limited ourselves artificially by limiting ourselves to 26 characters, when, in Real Character (or in Chinese or Japanese, or any of the ideographic languages), whole words can be compressed down to a single symbol. Perhaps 10x more concepts could be presented on a single page, and scanned with a quick mind, if we could adopt some more complex representation for our thoughts than ASCII.
That, of course, only speeds entering new information into your brain - the mechanism of a keyboard is illsuited for a character set like the above.
There will be a revolution in computing when voice and mind data can directly be transferred to a computer and translated into an ideographic language. ¶ 9:45 PM
I do often find myself fascinated by the same sorts of things as he, and that's why, maybe in a month or two, when I recover, I'll tackle the next book in the series, but it's more of an exercise in self torture than actual interest in the plot or characters.
Reading Stephenson's books always sparks me into reading some of his fascinating original references, Cryptonomicon, for example, caused me to read the autobiography of the german Admiral Donitz, which was the best book about the Atlantic war I'd read in many a year; it enlightened me considerably.
"Real Character" - a language invented by one of Newton's contemporaries - fascinates me. Lately I've been struck by how limited the English language is. Given how discerning an eye can be, we seem to have bandwidth-limited ourselves artificially by limiting ourselves to 26 characters, when, in Real Character (or in Chinese or Japanese, or any of the ideographic languages), whole words can be compressed down to a single symbol. Perhaps 10x more concepts could be presented on a single page, and scanned with a quick mind, if we could adopt some more complex representation for our thoughts than ASCII.
That, of course, only speeds entering new information into your brain - the mechanism of a keyboard is illsuited for a character set like the above.
There will be a revolution in computing when voice and mind data can directly be transferred to a computer and translated into an ideographic language. ¶ 9:45 PM
