Re: Wilkins' philosophical language in the news

On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 12:13:53PM +0200, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> Well, all this is very interesting! :) I didn't know this author. Has
> anybody already read his other books?
Oh, yes!  Cryptonomicon (to which the new Baroque Cycle is a sort of
prequel) is an amazing novel, if for no other reason than for the
sheer verisimilitude Stephenson brings to first-person narrative
from such diverse points of view - an eccentric mathematical
genius (actually, several, with different eccentricities) in WW2,
a dedicated Marine, a modern .com business type, an equally modern
computer hacker, and many others, showing empathy and respect for
so many different types of people that are so different that he
can't be like all of them himself.  It's amazing and captivating
reading, which is a good thing since _Cryptonomicon_ is a darn
huge novel.  You might want to read one of his other ones first,
like _Snow_Crash_, which is cyberpunk science fiction; _The_Diamond_Age_,
which is fairly straightforward SF with some computer sciencish
bits; or _Zodiac_, which is a modern-day thriller around the ecology
movement.  There's also a couple books written under the pseudonym
Stephen Bury, which take place in the present but have pretty far-out
premises: _Interface_, about a Presidential candidate who suffers
a stroke and is given a miraculous new treatment that lets him recover
fully but puts him under the control of an evil conspiracy; and
_Cobweb_, about a secret Iraqi biological weapons development project
in the U.S. heartland.

If you're interested in computers and modern technology and the
way it's shaping society, then I also recommend his short essay
_In_the_Beginning_was_the_Command_Line_.

> Well, I knew the Caractéristique Universelle of Leibniz, which is based on
> equivalent principles, but this one I don't remember hearing about it.
If it's what I'm thinking of, then Pinker mentioned it in his books, or at
least in _Words_and_Rules_.   The idea was to give everything a logical
name rather than an arbitrary one; each phoneme represents a branch along a
knowledge tree from the root toward the desired concept. I don't remember
reading about the script, though.

-Mark