Thanks, Dom for putting us on to Stephenson.
I am just finishing Cryptonomicon and then will start to read Quicksilver.
Roger
----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 3:29 PM
Subject: Re: Half Cocks: Abide With Me
> Mari-Lou
>
> The Stephenson werke is worth reading, but it's three books, The
> Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, & The System of the World)
> more than 2500 pages long. I loved it, an historical fantasy on the
> change from alchemy to science & the philosophical shifts that
> accompanied that, with an adventure story of pirates, tough ladies,
> European wars, competing philosophers (Newton vs Leibniz) etc. thrown
> in. I think Stephenson tries to be accurate as to the thinking of those
> 2 masters, but it is a fantastic fiction...
>
> Doug
> On 14-Mar-05, at 3:01 PM, Mari-Lou Rowley wrote:
>
>> Dominic, Neal Stephenson's book sounds like a must read for me. I can't
>> profess to be anything of an expert on Leibniz, but find his writings
>> fascinating and prescient... as do a lot of computer
>> scientists/mathematician I interview (the science writing that pays
>> the
>> bills.)
>> So not only things like object-oriented programming, but
>> aspect-oriented
>> programming, ant colony optimization, of course nanotechnology.. an
>> inherent intelligence in the code...
>>
>> Makes me thing of Steve McCaffery's work in monodology and poetics.
>> Heard him here a few years ago. Now he's an expat Canadian, teaching in
>> thePoetics Program, Department of English, SUNY-Buffalo
>>
>> So lots more to talk about but am on deadline and must "go under" for
>> awhile...
>>
>> Cheers until I surface again
>> ML
>>
>>
>> Mari-Lou Rowley
>> Pro-Textual Communications
>> www.pro-textual.com
>> Tel 604.708.8512
>> Fax 604.708.8512
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
>> poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dominic Fox
>> Sent: March 14, 2005 12:47 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Half Cocks: Abide With Me
>>
>> Thank you Mari-Lou. I have only the one small book of Leibniz's
>> myself, but other sources - I was recently reading Neal Stephenson's
>> _The Confusion_, in which Leibniz appears as a character and spends a
>> certain amount of time explaining his monadology in terms that make it
>> sound suspiciously like a precursor of various modern ideas in AI and
>> even object-oriented programming (there's a line about monads
>> maintaining some encapsulated internal state that could've come from
>> any Smalltalk primer). Given Stephenson's geek credentials (he once
>> wrote a book called _In the beginning was the command line_), this is
>> undoubtedly no accident.
>>
>> Stephenson may or may not have known that the word "monad" has
>> recently been adopted by computer scientists, via category theory, to
>> denote a particular approach to handling effects in pure functional
>> programming languages like Haskell.
>>
>> Leibniz himself can sound uncannily modern at times. Tell me this
>> doesn't remind you of Derrida:
>>
>> "Also, when we consider well the connection of things, we can say that
>> there are at all times in the soul of Alexander vestiges of all that
>> has happened to him and the marks of all that will happen to him, and
>> even traces of all that happens in the universe, although it belongs
>> only to God to recognise them all" (Discourse on Metaphysics, section
>> VIII)
>>
>> Derrida's vestiges, marks and traces are more fleeting, of course, and
>> one wonders whether even the divine Understanding could recapitulate
>> them.
>>
>> There are other Half Cocks in the archives, or on my website here:
>> http://codepoetics.com/half_cocks/poem.html
>>
>> Dominic
>>
>> --
>> // Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
>> // bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
>>
>>
>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> Department of English
> University of Alberta
> Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
> (780) 436 3320
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
>
> Speech
> is a mouth.
>
> Robert Creeley
>
> --
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