Post Holiday Update

I'm back in Boston after a lovely visit to New York. Vacations provide an excellent opportunity to pretend that you have the time to be reading the books that you shouldn't be reading, and this was no exception. I managed to get through Haskell Curry's Outline of a Formalist Philosophy of Mathematics, as well as Philip K. Dick's Ubik, and some reading on the history of science and the science wars. I received a copy of Lucky Jim which I'm about a third through and loving as well.

As a veteran couch surfer, I've found that one way to kill a day while waiting for your host to return home is to go to a library, grab a pile of random books, and just start poking through them. It was in one of these that I found the following about Alonzo Church, which I found interesting enough to share:

He looked like a cross between a panda and a large owl. He spoke slowly in complete paragraphs which seemed to have been read out of a book, evenly and slowly enunciated, as by a talking machine. When interrupted, he would pause for an uncomfortably long period to recover the thread of the argument. He never made casual remarks: they did not belong in the baggage of formal logic.

The full passage can be found here.