Here’s something I didn’t see coming. Remember the MIT Open Courseware class on Gödel, Escher, Bach I discovered and wrote about a month ago? Well, that day I submitted it to /r/cogsci on Reddit to bring it to the attention of some people I thought might appreciate it. I expected it to generate little interest, since it wasn’t formal cognitive science narrowly construed, such as a link to an article about cogsci research. Well, I was wrong.
That link became one of the most upvoted submissions to /r/cogsci in recent memory, and generated tremendous interest. Someone cross-posted to /r/philosophy. Around this time I submitted it to Wubel, where it became the featured submission for a few weeks. Then a redditor announced he was going to lead an online scheduled reading of the book with anyone who was interested. His home for this reading, /r/geb, mushroomed from 4 members to over 2700. Big class!
It looks like I launched a kind of online GEB movement. Quite a response to nothing more than free course materials for a beautiful but very intellectually challenging book! I’m happy to see it. Class starts today.
How cool is this. MIT Open Courseware offers a class called Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey. It is an entire course geared around Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach.
This is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read; it’s a true masterpiece. I first encountered it in high school. Ostensibly it’s a gorgeous web interconnecting art, mathematics and music, but that’s actually instrumental to the book’s true purpose. Quoth Wikipedia:
Hofstadter has emphasized that GEB is not about mathematics, art, and music but rather about how cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms.
And now MIT offers a free class geared around this book, using it as a kind of textbook, bracketed with a syllabus and class notes in PDF. All this for free. Wow. Props to the instructors, Justin Curry and Curran Kelleher, and to MIT for providing this to the world gratis.
I’d like to share a strange, beautiful object I just discovered by accident this morning. It is the quintrino.
Apparently it was first created by the sculptor Bathsheba Grossman. (This image is from her site.) Aside from it’s beauty, it has interesting mathematical properties. For example, it exhibits dodecahedral symmetry. The metal original is available on her site, but if you happen to own a 3D printer, you can download quintrino-like models from Shapeways and print one yourself.
Thus I do declare. Why?
A quasicrystal. These things were first created in a lab in 1984.
First, a quasicrystal is something that…
- is orderly; it exhibits perfect translational symmetry (i.e. it can be divided by straight lines into a sequence of identical figures).
- is aperiodic (i.e. not defined by a unit cell that repeats itself over and over) and is therefore irregular. Which is why it is radically different from ordinary crystal.
- is produced by crystallization, which is very sensitive to initial conditions (i.e., it can grow in wildly different ways with only tiny changes in how it starts).
And something is a chaotic system if it…
- is orderly; not random, but it looks random.
- is aperiodic.
- has sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
So there you go. And apparently, I’m not alone in thinking so either.
