Welcome to my brain. As you entered through my spinal cord, you may have noticed my cerebellum. It controls all the basic functions of my body, like breathing or pumping blood, on the subconscious level, allowing me to deal with more interesting things.
I conduct that more interesting business here in my cerebrum, within which my mind resides. To the right you can see some of my more artful aspects; sketching, music, Shakspere, among the cloud of thoughts there that are floating and billowing. And to your left you can view my more technical side; computing, astrophysics, and cognitive science, on the faces of the crystalline structure formed by my thoughts there.
And before you is my prefrontal cortex, where my mind is at it's strongest, and yet most volatile. Here my perceptions are translated into conscious thought, where I interpret and place meaning upon the quantum mechanical interactions which have created myself and the world I live in. Peer carefully into the maelstrom, and you will see where I reside...
Although my musical tastes are extremely varied, I spend most of my time listening to Classic Rock. With the revival of much of the music from that period, many of the former "supergroups" are touring again. This is giving me a chance to see live what I was too young for before. But by far my favorite is Jethro Tull, a group that never stopped.
Jethro Tull began as "The Blades" in 1964, with a bluesy style. Since then, they have metamorphosized several times, with many different members, and emerged from each to lay down yet another type of signature sound. Ian Anderson is the soul of Jethro Tull, and the primary creative genius. Anderson was never afraid to experiment, the lead instrument being a flute should attest to that. Thick as a Brick was one of the first epic pieces to come out of rock music, sparking others to attempt similar endevours. Jethro Tull is the rare gem which excels through many different styles, moods, and audiences.
Shakspere, not Shakespeare, was the last name recorded for William at his baptism, and therefore his name as far as the Church and Crown were concerned. He is, without a doubt, the greatest writer the english language has known, and his works have been translated into more languages than anything else, short of the Bible.
If you are not familiar Shakspere, you should become so. My personal favorites are Othello, Richard III, and King Lear. But if these are not to your taste, you should be able to find something in his Folio which will. Shakspere's works contain every type of conflict, antagonist, and protagonist used by writers. In fact, you may be familiarizing yourself with some of his writings and not even know it. The only possible foible to understanding Shakspere are the differences between Elizabethan and Modern english.
If this is your situation, or even if it is not, here are some adaptions and translations:
Yes, there many that I have missed, including the recent Romeo & Juliet. These may not be what you enjoy, but if you look, you will find something to fit your tastes.
If you are familiar with binary, you may have recognized this as the 8 bit representation of the number 42. This was the number provided by the supercomputer Deep Thought as the answer to the question of "Life, the Universe, and Everything".
Will we ever reach that level computing power? Even if we had the brute force number-crunching ability, Godel's Theorem argues that such simple answers don't exist. But that doesn't mean that supercomputers are unnecessary because they won't answer our questions. On the the contrary, we have to learn to ask the right kind of questions.
Most of the true supercomputers are in use for research, not on your desktop, because that is where that kind of power is necessary. One of the fields where this is most necessary is high energy physics. Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is currently in the process of receiving a new supercomputer unrivaled by any other known computer system. It is being delivered in modules, with each one tested to make sure it works correctly before the next is sent. Provided by Intel, the machine is based around its Pentium Pro processor, something you can buy for your desktop. But it uses more than one, 9,000 to be exact. When completed, it will be so fast, that it would take every man, woman, and child on the planet Earth, working with calculators, 142 years to do what this machine can do in one second. But here's the scary part: It's not fast enough to do the job it was designed for by itself.
But even the desktop machines today aren't slouches. They can provide you with everything you need for school, or work. And desktop machines are getting even faster, because currently processing power is doubling every 2 years. Someday, we will have the power of that supermachine on our desktops.
this increase in processing power has lead to some very interesting dilemmas in the field of computer science. The most amusing to me is a program to find huge primes. It is useless to run this program before the year 2561. If we were to start this program now, it would take 3.125*10^85 years to complete. If we wait 2 years, and use a machine that's twice as fast, it will only take 1.5625*10^85 years to complete. We can keep on going like this until the year 2561, when we can end up running this program and having it finish before the next generation processor could finish it.
"The conscious mind is a maelstrom of fleeting thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, conflicting desires and doubts; barely able to confine its attention to a single clear objective for a microsecond before secondary thoughts begin to adulterate it and provoke yet further trains of mental discourse. If you do not believe this then attempt to confine your conscious attention to the dot at the end of this sentence without involving yourself in any other form of thinking, including thinking about the dot." -- Liber Kaos, The Psychonomicon, Pete Carroll
The human mind does a fantastic number of things, some of which we are aware of, others which we are not. For example, how come we can recognize all of these as the letter A?
Each and every one of the A's above are different, so we return to the question, how come we know that these are all A's? You could argue that an A is always a triangle with the base moved up halfway to the vertex. But some of these A's don't fit that criteria.
As far as we understand the human mind, it establishs an "Eigen-A", kind of an average between all the A's we know. The mind then examines any character that might be an A with this Eigen-A, and if it is close enough, it decides that it is, in fact, an A. Some of the above A's were more recognizable than others, that is because they are closer to your particular Eigen-A.
This particular theory is being applied to recognition of other people (Why we don't forget our friends), and even quantizing beauty. This latter idea may sound horrific to some, but apparently beauty is dependent on each particular person's Eigen-face. The closer someone is to your Eigen-face, the more beautiful they appear.
As far as we understand, any one person's Eigen-face is determined as an average of all the faces of which they are familiar. Since the faces of our parents are most familiar, might this explain why men tend to date women who look like mom, or why women tend to date men who look like dad? Or even explain the Oedipus or Electra complexes?