Personal Log: Ben Versteegt

I wanted to complain about Tiscali in this log entry, but Rob already beat me to it. Oh well. Suffice to say that Tiscali is not delivering any mails to me... so if I'm not replying to anything, you know why. The missing posts and mails will probably be delivered to me in the next couple of days.

Now for some happier news (for me anyway): my paper has been approved; the evaluation went well and ten studypoints are on their way to me. Woohoo! The title, if you want to know, was "Human Intelligence in Machines: Turing, French and Chatterbots" (translated title; the paper is in Dutch).

I also finished "Star Trek: The Lost Years", although I may have reported this in a previous blog... It was a nice book, if a little slow at first. I wanted to start reading "Imzadi" right after that book, but I got caught up in another book I was reading: "The Devil and God" ("Le Diable et le Bon Dieu") by Jean-Paul Sartre. I finished it yesterday. It's a play about good and evil, and in the end, the main character in the play realises that the only way for him to truly love people, is to lead them into battle, kill and punish them, and do evil. Man is thrown back into his own existence; people have an incredible fear of nothingness, of death. This is what it means to be thrown back at yourself: in death, you are nothing. In death, no one can follow. The finite existence of man implies that man is alone. God is merely an illusion to comfort the people, so says the main character. There is only the earthly life and if one dies, there is nothing anymore. The main character realises that everyone is alone and everyone suffers. To at least ease the pain of that suffering a bit, Goetz (the main character) decides to take charge over the troops and fight against the enemy. This is the only way for him to love the people he commands: to lead them into war. This paradox is fascinating, but also very depressing; which is something of a characteristic of Sartre's philosophy.

Another book I'm reading and have almost finished, is New Frontier 5: Martyr. It's a very exciting and also fun book, as are all books in the NF series. I'm looking forward to finally finishing this book (I had to stop reading it three times already in the last year due to lack of time) and to focus my attention on only one book again: "Imzadi". I hear it's great.

Back to FF: the Odyssey mission is slowly getting started. I've posted yesterday, and I want to post today as well, but I'm not going to say that, since every time I said in a blog that I wanted to post, I suddenly didn't have the time for it anymore. So, I'm not saying I'm going to post. Just so you know.

That's it for now, I guess. See you in a next blog.

Regs,
Ben.