A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
by Janna Levin
Anchor Books, 2006
230 pages (paperback)

Available
Amazon.com
Indie Bound

Warning: Some Spoilers

Some things cannot be proven and will forever remain uncertain.  To accept that dangerous idea, one may need to be mad or be willing to risk it.  Janna Levin’s novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines looks at the real lives of “two mad treasures,” the most important mathematicians of the last century, Kurt Gödel (1906-78) and Alan Turing (1912-54).

Einstein’s General and Special Theories of Relativity were not the only challenges to early twentieth-century Enlightenment certainty. (more…)

I am going to attempt to revive this blog from its 4-5 months of slumber.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to pick up any remaining readers.  I began Discarded Image with several reviews and things were moving along well, but a combination of factors—e.g. a new house and increased professorial duties—just about killed any time I had to blog.   To add to that, I teach both traditional and online courses, and the courses online are a lot like blogging, so at the end of the day, it gets hard to get back online and write even more after already having done so much online for my classes.  Writing, however, is the only way (more…)

The author of Religious Literacy, Stephen Prothero has a very interesting article in USA Today this morning (”A Buddhist moment in America”).  In it, he takes a look at Tiger Woods confession from the perspective of religious literacy.  It is well worth reading.

Nonetheless, we expect, sometimes unconsciously, for things to proceed largely on Christian terms. We expect our presidents to be Christians and to quote from the Bible. And when they fall short of the glory of God, we expect them to call their shortcomings sins and to confess them not only to us, but also to Jesus. Part of living in a multireligious society, though, is learning multiple religious languages. In a country where most citizens cannot name the first book of the Bible, we obviously need more Christian literacy. But to make sense of the furiously religious world in which we live, we need Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist literacy too.  Read full article at USA Today…

Menachem Wecker’s blog (Iconia) at the Houston Chronicle has an interesting article on art in relation to Numbers 5 (the “wayward wife” passage).

At the risk of being crude, the narrative in Numbers 5 of the Sotah, the so-called “wayward wife,” ought to be a goldmine for biblical painters….Why have Jewish artists entirely neglected this important biblical episode, and why have Christian artists nearly avoided it altogether? It is hard to imagine that they were aware that the episode might never have been enacted… And even if Numbers 5 is meant to put forth a law that was never practiced, why should that have stopped artists?  Read the whole article…

A recent article at New Scientist suggests that “Our world may be a giant hologram.”

That is, not until Hogan realised that the holographic principle changes everything. If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.  Read the full article at New Scientist.

What does this mean for our fundamental perception of life?  Individuality? Pain? Happiness?   Future work in this area should be really interesting.

Front&Centre is seeking edgy short fiction [HT: Places for Writers]:

We are looking for fiction set in a realist tone, that concerns the contemporary. We are strictly non-genre and DO NOT publish science fiction, horror, fantasy or fluff of any kind. We prefer dirty realism, urban angst, noir and tales of ordinary woe. Otherwise, thematically, the magazine is wide open. Quality new fiction is what we want.  More information at Front&Centre…

Lately, my reading has consisted of several books on biblical interpretation.  This is, in part, due to my career, but it is also because I am entirely interested in the real world behind the text, by which I don’t mean some sermonization of the biblical text so as to make it sound like it was written in today’s world.  Understanding the religious mindset of ancient peoples is difficult, which is probably why some ignore it entirely.  When that happens, watch out.  Peter Enns is great at getting to these points in a very accessible way, and so I like to highlight his posts at Biologos when I can.  His most recent, “Yahweh, Creation, and the Cosmic Battle,” is a great and brief look into one of my favorite biblical motifs.  In it he writes:

One of the ways the Old Testament describes creation is through a conflict between Yahweh and the sea (or “waters” or one of the sea monsters, Leviathan or Rahab). Sea is a symbol of chaos, and so Yahweh’s victory in the conflict establishes order. He is the creator, the supreme power. Israel’s proper response is awe and praise.

One may argue that there is no single account of biblical creation.  Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis are at least two accounts and the many references to God versus the sea monster are considered other ways of representing creation.  Even the book of Revelation is not without its many allusions to the sea monster, where the sea is the home of all that is evil (for a good narrative critical look at Revelation see this book). Then there is John 1, where allusions to both the Old Testament and Greek philosophy play together, helping to form another lens through which one could describe creation, but this one featuring the logos. Seeing and accepting all of this for what it is helps create informed readers, as I tell my students.  So I’m done pontificating, but I would heartily recommend reading Peter Enns’ post in its entirety.  If you are interested in more, see also my recent review of John H. Walton’s book, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate.