waiting for Godel starts there and goes for pages and pages.
I'd like to think of myself as a fairly smart guy. Actually, though probably unnecessarily arrogant, I think that I recently came to the conclusion that I was a remarkably smart guy. Perhaps even genius. This is a real awakening for me (whether or not it's empirically true). I've never been one to ACTUALLY have confidence in my intelligence and it's a nice change of pace for me. I'm not sure about how that makes me feel. Nonetheless, I spent some fantastic time reading my friend's notes on a book he read about Godel. Whenever I need to absolutely sharpen my mind, I love talking to this guy. It's like a giant squeegee, wiping away all the emotions and other crap that builds up on your understanding of the world and reducing it to the essence. That, and the fact the he simply is one of the smartest people I have ever met in my life.
So, above and beyond that, Godel's theorem was riveting. But even more fascinating for me is that my friend simply used his blog as a source for notes back to himself. For me, this is the next natural extension of the web. Today, we have pages up that require people to go to specific sites and enter in all kinds of information. But that does not have to be the case! Imagine if there was some way you could make available ALL your understanding in a structured way. You could make the web that much more rich, and it would require no additional work besides the notes and information you already use to process through the day. Of course there are the privacy and security issues, for which I admit I do not have a great solution, but if you could make the sum knowledge of all your documents, emails, IM chats available widely, you have the very real opportunity to enlighten the world. Do not underestimate the amount of information and understanding that you carry around that no one else knows about. With luck, blogs like the one my friend did on Godel will be an excellent bridge from here to when we have our neural implants. Then we simply borg it up and we're one giant mutha-fuckin' consciousness. Oh yeah!