“I wonder... What's in a book while it's closed... Because as soon as I open it, there's a whole story with people I don't know yet and all kinds of adventure and deeds and battles... All those things are somehow shut up in a book. But it's already there, that's the funny thing. I just wish I knew how it could be.”
Michael Ende, The Neverending Story
“A wild dream and a far one -- but no wilder and no farther than some of the dreams of man.”
“That's the reason they're called lessons: because they lessen from day to day.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
“Think of a computer program. Somewhere, there is one key instruction, and everything else is just functions calling themselves, or brackets billowing out endlessly through an infinite address space. What happens when the brackets collapse? Where's the final “END IF”? Is any of this making sense?”
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
Book In-Jokes
Here I try to maintain a list of book in-jokes: little jokes that most readers won't notice, hidden in otherwise serious books (for more about
what "in-jokes" are, see at the end of the list).
I'll need your help: if you find any such in-jokes, let me know. Please include the word “injoke” in the subject.
The books are listed in no particular order.
Book Reviews / Read LogBook Reviews: FictionScience-Fiction Book ReviewsNon-Fiction Book ReviewsComputer Science Book Reviews
[1999-04-30]
Twenty years after its original release, the author of a spectacular masterpiece clarifies, once and for all, what the book is really, actually, about — in The 20th Anniversary Edition of Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Richard P. Feynman, a Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics, tried very hard to be the source of a large number of annecdotes. The first collection of these annecdotes, <a href=”/feynman”>Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, is an ammusing book about a curious person.
Could it possibly be that modern communication networks lead us to one of those rare crossroads between really far-fetched science-fiction and reality? In Darwin Among the Machines, George B. Dyson speculates that huge-scale non-human intelligence will inevitably evolve around us. Plus, the book is a refreshing history of both computing and evolution science.