Re: pi (the movie)

John Regehr (jdr8d@cs.virginia.edu)
Wed, 11 Aug 1999 17:41:08 -0400 (EDT)


> I found Galatea 2.2 astoundingly weak, myself. The rendition of Dutch
> syntax in English was worth the read (or was that in As She Crawled
> Across the Table?).

Galatea 2.2 weak? Remember that Powers writes great scientists, not great
science. I thought that The Gold Bug Variations was even better.

> For a bit of a Pynchon feel, try Cryptonomicon.

Very good read, but Stephenson is no Pynchon.

Cool book of the week: _The Commissar Vanishes_, a surreal book about
falsified photographs in Stalinist Russia. It's amazing to see the
evolution of some of these photographs - people were removed as they were
shot or shipped off the the Gulag, resulting in pictures that only show a
small fraction of the group that was originally photographed.

John