I'm probably coming.

Also, will the meetup's language be English? AlexeyM's username suggests so.

The presentation and exercise booklets seem to be pretty awesome.

1) Here is a nice prove of Pythagorean theorem:

Typo: proof.

Most people you know are probably weak skeptics, and I would probably fit this definition in several ways. "Strong skeptics" are the people who write The Skeptics' Encyclopedia, join the California Skeptics' League, buy the Complete Works of James Randi, and introduce themselves at parties saying "Hi, I'm Ted, and I'm a skeptic!". Of weak skeptics I approve entirely. But strong skeptics confused me for a long while. You don't believe something exists. That seems like a pretty good reason not to be too concerned with it.

• Yvain, 2004, source

Edit: authorial instance specified on popular demand.

If by "rationalist", the LW community means someone who believes it is possible and desirable to make at least the most important judgements solely by the use of reason operating on empirically demonstrable facts, then I am an ex-rationalist. My "intellectual stew" had simmered into it several forms of formal logic, applied math, and seasoned with a BS in Computer Science at age 23.

By age 28 or so, I concluded that most of the really important things in life were not amenable to this approach, and that the type of thinking I had learned was useful for earning a living, but was woefully inadequate for other purposes.

At age 50, I am still refining the way I think. I come to LW to lurk, learn, and (occasionally) quibble.

After you solve each Project Euler problem, you automatically get access to the forum thread where people compare their solutions to that problem. For example, I was happy to find Peter Norvig's impressively concise solution to #54.

By the way, it seems that the usual end-of-the-year SI fundraising is live now.

(Sorry if my English comes across as odd or bland; I'm tired and my feel for the language might be off.)

Here's a bit of a confession, because I feel like it.

I was diagnosed with encephalopathy of some kind when I was 19. Can't recall the specifics right now, but the gist of it is, I was born with brain damage. Due to that I've been suffering from a severe attention deficit, frequent emotional turbulence or periods of apathy, and rather unpleasant failures of willpower throughout my life, growing particularly troublesome around the last year of high school. I used to be rather disfunctional socially and emotionally, and found myself growing very nihilistic, neglectful and careless of myself and others.

I used to had a few good, true friends at school - despite being very introverted and getting tired of any company easily - but they all drifted away after graduation. Entering a state university and coping with most classes was trivially easy for me (my IQ is 135, and I simply enjoy reading up on a broad range of humanities on my own), but I flunked after my first year for three times in a row (due to hardly attending at all after the first month, neglecting to study for finals and failing to hand in papers). Didn't make any permanent acquaintances at uni, in part because of my prosopagnosia, in part because of my becoming rather callous to people.

As a child I had a great deal of empathy, but it hurt me, so my shell grew way too tough and I eventually started taking comfort in not caring for anyone; I frequently dreamed of my family/parents dying and me inheriting their small fortune, I lied to my parents habitually and took a sadistic kick of them being hurt by it, I hated the very thought of anyone being dependent of me and looking to me for aid, etc.

Then, in one winter week, things changed. I watched the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion and my shell was utterly shattered. It was a moment of utter catharsis for me. My fears, shames and anxieties were all laid bare in Shinji, and in following his story I learned of a way to remake myself. During a month of internal strife, I reconsidered my core values and found a new sense of ethics. My social anxiety is also gone; whereas previously I was hesitant to initiate any social contact, now I'm unafraid to try, occasionally fail and lose status, yet learn and suffer virtually no embarrassment. I'm often seen as eccentric, to put it generously, but it's still a hell of a lot better than what I used to resign myself to.

That was about 3 years ago, and in that time I have reforged the bonds with my immediate family (some considerable issues remain, like fits of hysteria or times when I lie pathologically, but it's nothing like the giant cold-hearted deception on my part that it used to be). I also realized my bisexuality and got into a relationship with an awesome guy who's greatly creative and truly sympathetic of me. (it's long-distance sadly, we only met a couple of times so far, but the total contact and connection between us was the best thing that ever happened in my life). All that helped me get my life moving; I'm finally making an honest effort to get an education in a field I enjoy (social work). I still have a lot of issues, and I'm going to need more professional help with my condition, perhaps more medication too, but what I'm certain of is that NGE was a helping hand when I needed it most and expected it least. No wonder I became a rather obsessive fanboy :)

I was intending to write a bit more, but I'm falling asleep. Damn, this ramble is unlikely to earn me much karma, and I'm being way too forthcoming about myself. Eh, I wanted to confess about all that to people that are high-status in my eyes, so here you go.

GEB is great as many things; as an introduction to formal systems, self reference, several computer science topics, Gödel's first Incompleteness Theorem, and other stuff. Often it is also a unique and very entertaining hybrid of art and nonfiction. Without denying any of those merits, the book's weakest point is actually the core message, quoted in OP as

GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter... GEB approaches [this question] by slowly building up an analogy that likens inanimate molecules to meaningless symbols, and further likens selves... to certain special swirly, twisty, vortex-like, and meaningful patterns that arise only in particular types of systems of meaningless symbols.

What Hofstadter does is is the following: he identifies self-awareness and self-reference as core features of consciousness and/or intelligence, and he embarks on a long journey across various fields in search of phenomena that also has something to do with self-reference. This is some kind of weird essentialism; Hofstadter tries to reduce extremely high-level features of complex minds to (superficially) similar features that arise in enormously simpler formal and physical systems. Hofstadter doesn't believe in ontologically fundamental mental entities, so he's far from classic essentialism, yet he believes in very low level "essences" of consciousness that percolate up to high-level minds. This abrupt jumping across levels of organizations reminds me a bit of those people who try to derive practical everyday epistemic implications from the First Incompleteness Theorem (or get dispirited because of some implied "inherent unknowability" of the world).

Now, to be fair, GEB considers medium levels of organization in its two chapters on AI, but GEB's far less elaborate on those matters than on formal systems, for instance. The AI chapters are also the most outdated now, and even there Hofstadter's not really trying to do any noteworthy reduction of minds but instead briefly ponders then-contemporary AI topics such as Turing tests, computer chess, SHRDLU, Bongard problems, symbol grounding, etc.

To be even fairer, valid reduction of high-level features of human minds is extremely difficult. Ev-psych and Cognitive Science can do it occasionally, but they don't yet attempt reduction of general intelligence and consciousness itself. It is probably understandable that Hofstadter couldn't see that far ahead into the future of cogsci, evpsych and AI. Eliezer Yudkowsky's Level of Organization in General Intelligence is the only reductionist work I know that tries to wrestle all of it at once, and while it is of course not definitive or even fleshed-out, I think it represents the kind of mode of thinking that could possibly yield genuine insights about the mysteries of consciousness. In contrast, GEB never really enters that mode.

You started 3 months ago and already did 90 Project Euler problems? Your future as a programmer is so bright you'll have to wear sunglasses.