Danny Vinik is webmaster for The Brink and author of the electronic novel Jack Tar: I'm reading Hit and Run: How John Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood, by Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters. It's about this guy John Peters who was once Barbra Streisand's hairdresser--he was just this cocky high-school dropout--who ended up getting this humongous deal, billions of dollars, to run things when Sony bought Columbia. He and Peter Guber were basically con men and ran the studio almost to bankruptcy. What I like about this book is the insider view of Hollywood. Style wins out over substance all the time, everywhere. I'm also reading Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics and Other American Heroes, by David Isay and Harvey Wang. Harvey's an amazing photographer. He was my roommate when I lived in New York, so I had to get this book. It's mostly interviews and stories about these really wonderful, intense eccentrics all over America, along with portraits done in a really benevolent, understanding way. Mark Muhlestein is a software engineer who, along with his family, has a contract to be cryonically preserved after his death by Alcor, a cryonics firm based in Scottsdale: Recently, I've been reading Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies, by Doug Hofstadter. It's about artificial intelligence on computers, the nature of intelligence and of what it would mean for a computer to be intelligent. One of the points Hofstadter brings up is the close relationship between the fluidity of concepts--the ability to see an abstract pattern, then to apply that pattern to a bigger picture--and to link this with the way creativity works. A lot of the book is a rant against the artificial intelligence research community, which claims computer programs are exhibiting intelligence when they're really just rigidly completing a series. Hofstadter's own programs behave and solve more the way a human being would, and he claims his programs are in a certain sense more intelligent because of this. He's quite interesting--his previous book Godel, Escher, Bach won a lot of awards. Ted Loman hosts the local cable and radio shows UFO AZ. His partner Brenda Williams assists in the shows' production. Ted: I'm reading a lot of books right now; well, actually, I'm having them read to me since I'm legally blind. Right now Brenda is reading me The Twelfth Planet, by Zecharia Sitchin. Zecharia is about 75 years old, and his background is impeccable. Brenda: He's a very learned man who can translate cuneiform and Hebrew. His research material is based on ancient and Sumerian texts, which he translates himself. Consequently, he's discovered references usually overlooked in the Bible. He found lots of references to the Nefilim and the Anunnaki; passages in the Bible which say the "Nefilim came down and mated with the daughters of man." His philosophy is that we were seeded by an ancient civilization. People tend to discount what he's saying because they think it's too out there, but for hundreds of years the church said the earth was the center of the universe and that it was flat. People on the outskirts of science, like Zecharia, are the Galileo's of today: He's a visionary who sees ahead.

		© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth