Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas is possibly my favorite nonfiction book of all time. After reading his famous Godel, Escher, Bach, I wanted to read as much of his writing as I could get access to, especially if it was about a variety of subjects. Luckily, this is exactly what Metamagical Themas is. Flipping through its thousand pages, you may see some detailed number theoretic proofs, followed shortly thereafter by a list of self-referential sentences, and then followed by iterative functions and graphs of orbits. These chapters are all based on columns that Hofstadter wrote when he was doing a column in Scientific American of the same name, and apparently SciAm has very little restrictions of the subject matter of these entries. So this blog is probably mostly going to be about topological graph theory, since that's what my current research is in. I'm also really interested in linguistics, physics, sociology, and many other things that will certainly make it in at some point.
I wanted to name my blog something reminiscent of Hofstadter's book. On page 32 he references his "colleague" Edgert B. Gebstadter, and his book Thetamagical Memas, so along these lines I'll start my blog Semidramatic Ballerinas. I know I shouldn't italicize it but it looks really nice. Other ideas I had included:
Send Me Tragic Null-shemas
Overdramatic Hiroshimas
Nonstatic Striped Hyenas
Melodramatic Subpeonas
Get ready for a whole bunch more things like this.
I wanted to name my blog something reminiscent of Hofstadter's book. On page 32 he references his "colleague" Edgert B. Gebstadter, and his book Thetamagical Memas, so along these lines I'll start my blog Semidramatic Ballerinas. I know I shouldn't italicize it but it looks really nice. Other ideas I had included:
Send Me Tragic Null-shemas
Overdramatic Hiroshimas
Nonstatic Striped Hyenas
Melodramatic Subpeonas
Get ready for a whole bunch more things like this.
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