That's a really interesting point. I hadn't drawn that connection before.

And if anyone's reading this and hasn't read Hofstadter, you're making a mistake, it's utterly perspective-changing stuff. Well, it was for me, at least.

And don’t feel you need to go straight to GEB, either. I think his collection of Scientific American columns, Metamagical Themas, is also great and much more accessible.

You are guilt-tripping me for using my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach to raise my monitor before I got around to reading it.

It's a book that works on many levels.

A New Kind of Science is a much better monitor stand.

Eye-level, in my case.

I read it when I was about 9 or 10, I didn't understand any of it at all but I used to pick it up and look at the pictures of the Escher drawings, which were amazing.

Then, after I graduated from college, a friend of mine who was finishing his physics degree mentioned that he had just finished it and that it was life-changing. I read it again and deeply regretted having put it down for those 12 intervening years.

One of my elementary school classmates brought printouts of Escher's Waterfall to share. I accepted one, took it home, and taped it to my bedroom wall. My father saw it and loaned me his copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach.

At first, I flipped through the book looking at the Escher prints. My second time through, I read the dialogues. Next I had a go at reading the chapters and got lost. Maybe on my fifth read-through (years later) I actually attained an understanding of Gödel's Theorem (at least for a brief moment before it vanished again).

I credit GEB (and its dialogues like Little Harmonic Labyrinth) for helping prepare me to deal with the kind of multi-level abstraction involved in developing a language interpreter or machine simulator. Especially that time I had to debug a crash that only occurred when running my simulator inside a simulated instance of itself (i.e. when three levels deep, but not two).