nawl

So, classes. The oddest thing in my schedule this semester is EE129, which was listed as "Neural and Nonlinear Information Processing", and the list of topics covered looked so cool I had to see what it was about.

The first class, I find out that it's actually a "self-contained" course, because "all of this material is new" and invented by the professor himself. He and a group from Budapest have been working on a chip that implements analog neural networks much faster than any software can, so he decided to teach an undergraduate class on it. "You know that thousand-page book by Stephen Wolfram that came out last year?" the professor asked, "Well, that's only a subset of what we're covering in this class." From everything I've heard about the book, it also suffers from the "I did it all myself" and "I'm re-inventing the universe" syndrome. What is it with these cellular automata people?

And French, "Women in French Literature". All right. We have a book chapter to read for tomorrow (in English), entitled "The 'Risk' of Essence". Representative quote: "If essentialism is more entrenched in constructionist logic than we previously acknowledged, if indeed there is no sure way to bracket off and to contain essentialist maneuvers in anti-essentialist arguments, then we must also simultaneously acknowledge that there is no essence to essentialism, that essance as irreducible has been constructed to be irreducible."