h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Lear,

I was just taking a look at your home-spot after reading your excellent Chinese Room Entry and was flattered to find my name there on your home-spot as a source for good conversation! Thank you for the kind compliment. One of my earliest conversations on H2G2 was with you Lear, and I did enjoy it. Just wanted to drop you a little note saying that I appreciate being noticed.

-- ZenMondo

I second that thank you! So nice to see my name on the page of someone I so admire.

Aw, folks, you shouldn't have... You're welcome, ZenMondo, and you too Zmrzlina. My only regret is that I don't get out and about enough to add more names to the list.

Zen, did you ever get around to reading The Dharma Bums? I seem to remember there was a little local difficulty with the librarian around your way. What a shame - there's a nice (nearly) pristine copy of the book sitting right here in this very room, recently thumbed through by my very own hands. Web technology being in a rather primitive state, I'm afraid I can't upload the book itself for your benefit. But let me, at least, volunteer my wholehearted recommendation...

All the best, wondering if it's his birthday or something,

Lear

Aha! I ****KNEW***** I was forgetting something! Dharma Bums! The local Barnes & Noble finally got a copy, but the cover price (I think it was $12.95US) seems a bit steep for a paperback. Even a Jack K. paperback. I DID get my library fine payed off finally and have been going crazy with new reading... but Dharma Bums completly slipped my mind. I've been in a Sci-Fi mood and have been raiding those racks. The library near my house also has a great collection of Graphic Novels so I've been reading comics I've hummed and hawed about buying or could not find. From the Graphic Novel Shelf I've gotten ALL winners:

Watchmen (This came out when I was *just* underage to read it, and never got around to getting it since back issues were so expensive the the trade paperback is $20.00 more than my monthly comic book budget (about $6.00))

Astro City
Why I Hate Saturn (WONDERFUL!!!!)
and...
The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (this is by Scott McCloud who did Zot! (one of my all time favorites) and the reknowned _Understanding Comics_ (IMO required reading for EVERYONE))

OK I also got some John Byrne Wonder Woman thing those are comics I wou;dn't pay for, but I think I really NEED my own copies of the above titles.

SO, do you like comix?

Err... I'm not too well up up on the graphic novel scene, but those titles sound like they might be a bit obscure, only available in America perhaps. There is a great comic shop here in London, in Covent Garden, and I used to know someone who went there all the time. Kept trying to drag me along too, but I could never quite see the attraction - more interested in Dobells Jazz Shop just round the corner on Shaftesbury Avenue, actually. We lost touch somewhere along the way, not surprisingly perhaps...

I like some of the more conventional prose sci-fi... The cyberpunk writers, for example, although I think Gibson's star seems to have faded a little... Neal Stephenson's pretty interesting - I like the Tower of Babel motif in 'Snow Crash', although I haven't yet read his newest one, Cryptonomicon. Going back a bit further, Philip K Dick had an enduring ability to tie people's neural networks up in knots. I swear I've never been quite the same since reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Or whatever the damn thing was called...

Ah! I loved "Snow Crash"! I wanted my very own virtual reality Librarian. I wrote a whole paper on one scene where the hero (I can't remember his name) walks *through* a crowd of people, as if they were a fogbank. I haven't read any other cyberpunk because I haven't been motivated...but I think I just found motivation

Gibson was my last Favorite Author before I stopped having "favorite authors" I agree, I like the Sprawl stuff (Johnny Mnemonic (story NOT movie), Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) better than the new series that began with Virtual Light. (But of course I am still buying them like they are going out of fashion -- oh wait, aren't they? Screw it. I love 'em)

The only Gibson novel I don't own is _The Difference Engine_ which he co-wrote with Bruce Sterling. I remember not liking about half of it. I was certain the parts I hated must have been written by Sterling. Now that I think on it, only one phrase did I really abhor. At one point the phrase "mounds of womanliness" or some such is in there. Ugh. But damn, the topic is fascinating. Especially since I was a HUGE Babbage fan before I read the novel, and consider Lady Ada Lovelace to be the patron saint (if not goddess!) of all coders.

Snow Crash turns me on in a major way. The Diamond Age also rocks. I also have neglected Cryptonomican. We both should be whipped.

The problem with Cryptonomicon is that it's just so *huge*. At 900-odd pages, it rivals the Bible for digressionary extra-narrative detail. Can't these novelists show a little consideration for us time-poor Westerners, and be more economical with their prose...

But programmers etc seem to regard Stephenson as one of their own, in a way they perhaps would never have quite been able to do with Gibson, who I think was always writing from the 'outside' of technology more as a writer and observer of popular trends. Stephenson, I think, actually has a background in computer programming and so forth. At least, that's the impression I get from his webpage @ http://www.well.com/user/neal/cypherFAQ.html ... Not that I'm any kind of computer whizz myself, although if I don't regulate this h2g2 habit more carefully I might have to start leaning in that direction a little...

If memory serves, I think the hero / protagonist of Snow Crash goes by precisely that name - Hiro Protagonist. I can't remember that particular scene, Zmrzlina - which world was he in at the time, real or virtual? Perhaps it doesn't make much difference these days...

Lady Ada Lovelace seemed to get 'blocked out' (perhaps I should say 'bloked out', 'bloke' being English slang for 'male person') of the earlier accounts of the development of the Difference Engine, but now I think people have started to redress the balance a little... I have a literary background myself, so I confess I know her mainly just as 'Byron's wife', which is rather criminal especially bearing in mind that I'm no great admirer of Byron...

Lady Ada is indeed the mother of programming. It was she who upon reading the theory behind the operation of Babbage's Analytical Engine conceptualized the conerstones of every programmer's repitoire.

These are:

* The conditional jump

* While Loop

* and one other that escapes my memory right now... maybe it was the idea of subroutines... oh well.