I just watched " Arrival " - not a bad SF piece. Possible spoiler - these days conquest of time seems to be a favorite theme. as it is in " Back to the Future ", one of the best movies on the theme which appropriately makes a joke of the concept of time travel. We are obsessed with time. Can we "travel" in it aside from the 60 seconds per minute pace we are stuck with? Does the future exist or has fate laid it all out like the road ahead? Does it all exist in one "eternal now"? You would think Science is immune to such fantasies, but there are serious scientists who would seem to say that time is an illusion. We supposedly live in the "eternal now" - whatever that could possibly mean. Others say time is basic. Lets face it, they are dreaming and guessing like the rest of us. The skeptical part of me suspects that if we paid our physicists better they would not need to write books for the general public challenging the reality of time. A...

This blog is a "work in progress" related to the current one by a long, flimsy bridge not yet created. The idea behind "Zen of Value" is that we all have a super computer between our ears, capable of instantly making calculations that are beyond the ability of any traditional computer. "Value" is a case in point, although when Hofstadter discusses the mind, he basically demonstrates the awesome power of this "meat computer". His career illustrates the fact that exploring the workings of the mind don't have much to do with "AI" after all. "Value" seems to be one of those things that holds out promise for a formal definition, even a kind of math, that elude most categories. In particular: A lot can be learned from comparing "value" with whatever it is that "money" stands for. Money obeys the rules of arithmetic but value obeys only a subset. In particular, value a and value b can be compared but you can...