Books and more…

I’ve done some looking at my boxes lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that I _really_ need a bookshelf. I don’t think that’s unusual for an engineer (or indeed any profession). You tend to come across volumes that hold a lot of relevant information for you. I mean, personally, I have everything from my 2A calc texbooks to K&R, my Java and hardware books. It’s getting to the point where I have a stack of books sitting next to me and the simple act of looking something up can involve a whole 5-10 minutes of fiddling through a pile of heavy unwieldy books…

Maybe by the time I get out of university I’ll be able to create an impressive stack of literature that I can use as the backdrop to my home office ;)

It’s often been suggested that electronic versions of books are the way to go. At this stage, I would highly disagree with that. There’s something a lot more convenient about using a physical, easy to thumb through, easy to read book. Sure, you can’t do a full text search and they weigh a ton, but thery’re convenient and a lot more robust than electronic equipment in general. Heh, I like books :)

Oh yeah – this is a very interesting site I came across: SodaPlay. You get to construct cool ‘creatures’ out of masses and springs and challenge AI created machines in a race to the death on an obstacle course. Fun Fun! Unfortunately for us, it seems like the machines are winning. Human creativity is keeping us in the game so far, but the machines can evolve faster, be more precise and go through more generations far quicker than we can. Hmm. Makes me a bit worried about the future. I still maintain that the only way for humans to maintain their ‘place’ in a society that will soon be dominated by more powerful (and probably soon to be intelligent) machines is to augment ourselves. Whether this be through biomechanical means or through genetic augmentation I don’t know – but it’ll be done some time in the future.

Oh yeah – you need Java for SodaPlay…