This chapter was a little bit more complex for me to understand; reading it again when I am older will definitely give me new insights. A main theme of GEB Hofstadter discussed in the introduction was that meaningful knowledge can be drawn out of meaningless constructs. For an example, the pq- formal system by itself is meaningless symbols with rules attached.  – – p – – – q – – – – –  But when the p is assigned the meaning plus, the q is assigned the meaning equals, and each dash represents a unit, the meaning suddenly becomes clear. 2 plus 3 equals 5.  A literary connection I made when…

Let’s keep this short. This memoir was terrifying. It’s difficult to imagine going through something so horrible and being forced to face a deeply flawed system that favors perpetrators. I’m still in shock how this memoir proves how little control women have over their own lives. The world should read and acknowledge the fact that one in five women go through this. Everyone should know the name of the author. Chanel Miller. 

This is a historical fantasy novel by Shelley Parker-Chan, about a girl who assumes her dead brother’s identity and attempts to also take his fate of greatness. I will say that this book was pretty entertaining and had some good ideas. However, there were definitely some things that took away from the overall effect the author was going for.  I just couldn’t ignore some of the plot holes in this book. In the beginning, the main character was a child living through a famine. As a girl, she had no hope for her future, and her brother and father made sure of that. Basically, when her brother was a baby,…

This chapter begins with the MU puzzle, which is meant to represent deriving theorems from a set a rules. Basically, the goal is to produce MU from MI.  Rule #1: If a string ends in “I”, you can add a “U” to the end. For example, “MI” can become “MIU”.  Rule #2: If a string starts with “M” (i.e., is of the form “Mx”), you can double the portion of the string after the “M”. For example, “MI” can become “MII”.  Rule #3: If a string contains “III”, you can replace it with “U”. For example, “MIIII” can become “MUI” or “MIU”.  Rule #4: If a string contains “UU”, you can remove it. For example, “MUU”…

Immediately upon starting Göodel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter, I knew this was going to be a goliath of a book to finish. For this reason, I have decided to upload my thoughts in parts.  What I have gleaned from the introduction is that this book is going to be an examination of knowledge from the perspectives of mathematics (logic), infinite artwork, and music.  The Canon is a form of music in which the stated theme is repeated in many different ways; I modeled an example given in the book using Online Sequencer: https://onlinesequencer.net/4807786  The tune of Good King Wenceslas is the stated theme, found…

My sources for book recommendations all seemed to love this book, but I absolutely did not get the hype when reading it. However, some of my own preferences with the genre may play a role with my perception of Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman. First of all, I am a sucker for stories about a person and their cat. Donut’s full name (Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk) and character was probably the only thing that made me laugh in this entire book. Other than that, I don’t get the humor at all. There’s nothing worse than a comedy book that’s not funny, because then it just becomes boring.…