Gödel, Escher, Bach video lectures

[Cramulus]

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been recorded as a series of video lectures for MIT's Open Courseware project.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/geb/VideoLectures/

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Excellent.

Now I just need to find the time between school and work to watch these...

[Template]

Excellent.

[Elder Iptuous]

awesome!
thanks for the link-o, Cram...

[bones]

Thanks to this link I found out the latest realmediaplayer adds a 'download' button to all videos online ever.
I'm sorry, but that fact turned out to be more interesting than the video itself. Needs better lecturer, this guy is painful to watch. Is it just me?

[Brotep]

I've met Hofstadter.  He's a douche.  Not as much as Stephen Wolfram, but who is?

[Cramulus]

yeah? what happened? I've always wanted to meet the guy.


I took a class with one of his collegues
she described him as "a brilliant man with a few queer ideas"

[Elder Iptuous]

I corresponded with him through the mail, and he was pretty decent fellow, from my experience.  (he even did me a hand drawn invertable ambigram of my name, and not even one from an invertible font set)
what did he do to lessen your opinion of him?

[Brotep]

what did he do to lessen your opinion of him?

I took his "writing structured verse" course.  He proved to be rather elitist.  He also made one of my classmates cry.

[Elder Iptuous]

what did he do to lessen your opinion of him?

I took his "writing structured verse" course.  He proved to be rather elitist.  He also made one of my classmates cry.

Was his elitism expressed by assuming everyone you and your classmates to be out of the running for the 'elite'?  i can see why that would be annoying.  or was it simply an open disdain for a large segment of society?
what did he do to make your classmate cry?  from the pictures of him that i've seen, he doesn't look like he could throw a very good punch.

[Brotep]

Was his elitism expressed by assuming everyone you and your classmates to be out of the running for the 'elite'?

When I told him I liked structured verse, he made some statement to the effect that everyone else was out of the running for the elite.  He was so zealous about it, I found it obnoxious.

what did he do to make your classmate cry?  from the pictures of him that i've seen, he doesn't look like he could throw a very good punch.

Admittedly the guy (the student) wasn't the brightest... Each day in class we would present a poem we wrote for critique; he chose one that was about his girlfriend, who had apparently committed suicide.  Hofstadter ripped it to shreds.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

So you think he's a douche because he critiqued a bad, but personal, poem that was submitted for critique, instead of giving the guy platitudes because it was a "heart and soul" poem?

[rong]

maybe it was all the bad poetry that drove her to it.

[Brotep]

So you think he's a douche because he critiqued a bad, but personal, poem that was submitted for critique, instead of giving the guy platitudes because it was a "heart and soul" poem?

I guess it's more that I thought he was a douche at the time than I do now, and the association of douche was so strong in my mind.

But no.  Not platitudes.  Not heart and soul.  It was a shitty poem for sure, but he didn't just say that--he tore the kid a new asshole.

maybe it was all the bad poetry that drove her to it.

Yeah, if only he understood cadence and meter, she would still be with us today.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

So you think he's a douche because he critiqued a bad, but personal, poem that was submitted for critique, instead of giving the guy platitudes because it was a "heart and soul" poem?

I guess it's more that I thought he was a douche at the time than I do now, and the association of douche was so strong in my mind.

But no.  Not platitudes.  Not heart and soul.  It was a shitty poem for sure, but he didn't just say that--he tore the kid a new asshole.

Did he tear the kid a new asshole, or did he... as you originally said... rip the poem to shreds?

There is a difference. Picking out every flaw in a poem submitted for critique is not the same as slamming the author. Did he personally slam the kid? Or did he just pick apart the poem, which would, in fact, be his job?