Monday Night Geekazoid Bullets

Some things that research in theoretical computer science teaches you:

• To escape a garden maze, always turn left at any intersection.  (Also known as depth-first search.)
• Being a good Tetris player is exactly as hard as finding the shortest tour of a group of cities that visits each city exactly once.  Well, in an asymptotic sense, anyway.
• There is no such thing as intelligence, at least the way we commonly think of it.  Over forty years ago, researchers wrote a computer program that arguably passed the Turing test for artificial intelligence, at least back then.  Interestingly, that same program probably would not pass today, in our more machine-enlightened society.   Besides factual knowledge, intelligence is also fundamentally biased by emotion and perception: there are varieties of intelligence, from bean counting to empathy, none of which is lesser than another.  Most people have intuitively known this in some form for a long time, but it is starting to become formalized.  This has deep implications for, e.g., communication with dolphins (who are possibly just as "intelligent" in some sense as we are).
• Observations on the random motions of miniscule tea leaves led to the basis of modern financial market analysis.  Not really computer science, per se, but we got our fingers in that pie in the end, and pretty deeply at that.
• We can be paid to think about marriage, at least insofar as it is just a metaphor for scientifically interesting abstractions.  Which is not to say that real human marriage doesn't fall in that category somewhere, just that computer science theorists wouldn't touch that reality with a million-foot pole.  That's sociology.
• An individual person can never comprehend all comprehensible scientific problems, but a group distributed over an infinite period of time can.  Social cooperation, which seems to be encoded into our behavior, is the basis for all success.  The question now becomes: is time infinite?
• There exist infinitely many incomprehensible scientific problems.  This is neither a refutation of science nor a support of mysticism, it is simply a numerical reality in the sense that neither an individual nor a group can survive for an uncountably infinite period of time since both are countable.
• DNA is just a formal language.  Its expression therefore becomes a computational problem, and so, say, the possible cure of all possible genetic diseases nothing more than a matter of computer time, at least in theory.  And yet the bulk of our computer power is reserved for the NSA: breaking codes.  One wonders if we 21st century humans are really that far removed from our ancestors in 10,000 BCE.

These are the things that I think about on a monday night.  Perhaps we should have made fish tacos again, instead of turkey burgers; I have always found turkeys to be problematic animals.  Anything that makes a loud noise directly before settling in for the night seems to me to be troubling in some sense.