Some Of My Favorite Things - Digital Signal Processing, Wavelets, Neural Nets, Fuzziness, the 'Stones (before Brian Jones died), the Beatles, the Stooges (ala Iggy Pop), Tom Waits, the wife, the kids, rock music, the (older) Simpsons, King of the Hill, (not necessarily in that order) etc.
Favorite Sayings
"It's harder to work with your friends than against your enemies." Steve Edlefsen
"When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." Archbishop Helder Camara of Brazil
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." Tom Waits
"Quod cibus est aliis, aliis est venenum." (Latin: One man's meat is another man's poison.)
"One man's Mede is another man's Persian." George S. Kaufman
"To be is to do"--Socrates.
"To do is to be"--Jean-Paul Sartre.
"Do be do be do"--Frank Sinatra.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"All prophesies come true, if you wait long enough." Steve Edlefsen
"There is no one more destitute than a miser." Steve Edlefsen
"Some people say love is a gift, but like any brightly wrapped box with a shiny bow, it's what's on the inside that counts." Steve Edlefsen
"Be able to admit you're wrong, but also be able to admit you're right." Steve Edlefsen
"... wherein it is overusual to blanch the obscure places and discourse on the plain." Francis Bacon
Note: To access Steve's Wacky Virtual World below you must have a VRML viewer. Parallel Graphics has one free, the Cortona viewer, at their site:
Also, you may have to download and install the DirectX drivers from Microsoft to hear the really cool X-files midi music. Enjoy!
Links
A wild phantasmagoric romp through Europe at the end of WWII and beyond. Finally finished reading this one: ThomasPynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Also, Vineland.
For an interesting connection between Gravity's Rainbow and Kurt Cobain of the rock band Nirvana click here.
A wild phantasmagoric romp..., well, you get the idea, Bored of the Rings by James Beard and Doug Kenny, then of the Harvard Lampoon. A dead-on sendup of the Tolkien Trilogy and U.S. culture circa 1969. I consider this to be the greatest work of satire in the 20th century. James Beard, Doug Kenny, et al also teamed up on another brilliant satire, "The National Lampoon's High School Year Book Parody".
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, a cautionary tale of science and engineering run amok. All my fellow engineers should read this book just for its humor.
