A lot of what I liked about GEB was this rambling quality; it helped me realize that what I wanted to be was a generalist, not a specialist. It also helped me discover some things about math and reductionism that I’ve since read more about, but that at the time helped me fill in some blanks in my map of reality.

Maybe I shouldn’t have qualified it as “life-changing”, but it was certainly an immensely enjoyable book to read for me.

It’s what happens when humanity’s tendency towards long rambling stream of consciousness meets humanity’s tendency towards circular-logic pseudophilosophical gobbledygook and paraidolia.

There’s a lot of basic boolean logic thrown into the mix, some set theory, and talk about basic programming concepts, philosophy, related to the next subject, to the next subject, to the next subject, and on until the end of the book. There is no conclusion, no insight. The much-heralded existence of “strange loops” is not suprising or really worth pondering further if you’ve ever encountered paradox in fiction or formal logic.

Zen koans are the art of spewing gibberish at a person until their mind gives up and they can concentrate on things they would rather think about. I don’t need a thousand page book to tell me that, or to do that to me. I can test my patience by staring at a wall for twelve hours, thank you very much.

I suspect Wolfram’s book about cellular automata being the crux of the universe is little different than this.

http://tools-for-thought.com/2008/10/22/one-week-on-the-low-information-diet/

I have a twitter account:

http://twitter.com/Michael_GR

But I use it mostly for my TH writings..

http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html

It’s a savior.

For computer-related distractions, I think that Paul Graham’s post about “Disconnecting Distraction” sums up what to do pretty well:

http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html

Something similar applies for purely printed stuff. Put your “junk reading” materials next to the couch or some other place where “sitting here means I’m not doing serious work”. Put your serious stuff someplace else, where you don’t have distractions handy. This makes it easy to time how long you were sitting at one place or another.