Today's I Ching

	The present is embodied in Hexagram 63 - Chi Chi (After Completion): We see progress and success in small matters. There will be advantage in being firm and correct. There has been good fortune in the beginning, but there may be disorder in the end.
	There are no changing lines, and hence the situation is expected to remain the same in the immediate future.
	The things most apparent, those above and in front, are embodied by the upper trigram K'an (Water), which represents danger and the unknown.
	The things least apparent, those below and behind, are embodied by the lower trigram Li (Fire), which represents brightness and warmth.

Cold Mint Nor

"If you give a man the correct information for seven years, he may believe the incorrect information on the first day of the eighth year when it is necessary, from your point of view, that he should do so. Your first job is to build the credibility and the authenticity of your propaganda, and persuade the enemy to trust you although you are his enemy."

-- A Psychological Warfare Casebook Operations Research Office Johns Hopkins University Baltimore (1958)

Metamagical Themas

Metamagical Themas is an eclectic collection of articles written for Scientific American during the early 1980s by Douglas Hofstadter, and published together as a book in 1985 by Basic Books (ISBN 0-465-04566-9).

The subject matter of the articles is loosely woven about themes in philosophy, creativity, artificial intelligence, typography and fonts, and important social issues. The volume is substantial in size and contains extensive notes concerning responses to the articles and other information relevant to their content. (One of the notes--page 65--suggested memetics for the study of memes.)

Major themes include: self-reference in memes, language, art and logic; discussions of philosophical issues important in cognitive science/AI; analogies and what makes something similar to something else (specifically what makes, for example, an uppercase letter 'A' recognisable as such); and lengthy discussions of the work of Robert Axelrod on the prisoner's dilemma and the idea of superrationality.

The concept of superrationality and its relevance to the Cold War, environmental issues and such is accompanied by some amusing and rather stimulating notes on experiments conducted by the author at the time. Another notable feature is the inclusion of two dialogues in the style of those appearing in Gödel, Escher, Bach. Ambigrams are mentioned.

There are three articles centered on the Lisp programming language, where Hofstadter first details the language itself, and then shows how it relates to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Two articles are devoted to Rubik's Cube and other such puzzles. Many other topics are also mentioned, all in Hofstadter's usual easy, approachable style. Many chapters open with an illustration of an extremely abstract alphabet, yet one which is still recognizable as such.

The game of Nomic was first introduced to the public in this column, in June 1982, when excerpts from a book (still unpublished at the time) by the game's creator Peter Suber were printed and discussed.

The title is an example of wordplay: it is an anagram of Mathematical Games, the title of Martin Gardner's column that Hofstadter's column succeeded in Scientific American.