So, I was just reading this article from slashdot on Chess, machines & the human mind.

The author ruminates on the connections between chess playing machines & the workings of the human mind. There is also a mention of Roger Penrose's ENM (The Emperor's New Mind), where Mathematician-scientist Roger Penrose argues that human intelligence involves not just computation but a grasp of abstract entities such as the Mandelbrot Set. Going further, Penrose's next book - Shadows of the Mind looks at this in a much deeper way, arguing about the non-computability of the human thought process, and using Godel's famous Incompleteness Theorem to show this.
More on this topic later...

I was also checking out Brian Greene's The Fabric of Cosmos on the web, his new book. His The Elegant Universe is one of the most lucid books I have read on the wonderfully fascinating topics of General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, leading onto String theory. His latest book is on time. I have also, by some good fortune, come into possession of some of the Feynman Lectures in Physics and Stephen Hawking's Cambridge Lectures on black holes and related topics in MP3 format, and I have been putting my car audio system to great use, I am happy to say!

I was reading this somewhere recently (it was in the book Phantoms in the Brain), and I thought it was beautiful. The idea was to try to give analogies to anything that was in excess, wasteful to do, etc. And here is what Shakespeare had to say:

"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice, or add another hue unto the rainbow....is wasteful and ridiculous excess."

On another plane of thought, I thought this piece from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was quite profound:

Then, to the rolling Heaven itself I cried,
Asking, "What Lamp had Destiny to guide
Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?"
And - "A Blind Understanding!" Heaven replied.