10 Years After

A House Is Not A Motel

In my poetry class we have to write a couple of papers. This first paper is due on the 17th of February and we were given the poem Monday in class. The poem was distributed as a photocopy of the poem. This included the title of the poem but lacked the author. The instructor commented that he intended to leave out the author because he didn't want us to know who it was. Well, of course curiosity got the better of me. Thinking about the response that O'Donnell had his 'Computers, Writing and Literature' class (ENGL 3134) write about Google, I thought I would do a Google search.
I didn't have the poem in in front of me, but I remembered the title and the jist of the poem.

"Black Silk" Vest

It took a few minutes to find. After skipping over a few hits that were obviously not what I was wanting and sifting through a few possible matches, I found something. This was a page that didn't have commentary, but it did give the author of the poem. With this in hand I thought I'd check the ETSU library's catalog. Sure enough, it has the book of poetry which contains the poem in question.

Tess Gallagher's 'Amplitude : new and selected poems.' And, wouldn't you know it, it wasn't checked out.

Mechanisms In The Forever Loop

I've been thinking a lot about the philosphic theory of determinism ever since encountering it last semester. It seems to me that this is what Isaac Asimov had in mind in his Foundation series. Simply put, if all the universe is an effect of some cause, that with a powerfull enough computer one should be able to predict the future. People, discounting that the soul or concious is more than the some of the parts, are merely a collection, if even that, of atomic particles. Much like billard balls move about a pool table with predictable results (this reminds me of the discussion of randomness I had with Kenny once) so too do all the atomic parts which make up man. We react to the causes on us with predictable results. Well, again, it would be predictable if we understood all the reactions going on and had a computer able to not only keep up with all these instances, but also predict into the future. Very fascinating. Most likely impossible to have a computer this powerful, but an interesting concept.