Birds of a feather lisp together

Now that I have some time in my hands (and I already mis Lisp), I'm watching several old Lisp talks, and stumbled upon This event.

On December 3 and 4 of 2004, the Computer Science Department at Indiana University hosted this conference on the occasion of Dan's sixtieth birthday.

Guy Steele's talk is great, as always. Nothing surprising there.  Talking about Dan's ideas and Dan itself (and giving a feeling about Dan being isomorphic to what Gilad Bracha says about Luca Cardelli here).

Gerald J Sussman's talk is also very nice, again, as usual.

And all talks I saw have that lispy emotion that we love.

But something that stroke me the most (that after reading 'The information' I realize more) was when Guy Steele talks about the time he read a draft of GEB. It's also a warm fuzzy feeling. Reading GEB leaves some trace in the reader forever. You never read a book the same way, or look at reality in the same way. Same happens with SICP (in process analysis).

Then I realized that in the picture of the event, there are the 3 of them. gls, gjs, and Douglas Hofstadter. Because obviously, they are "friends".  And the realization that the authors of my 2 favourite books ever hang around sometimes.

I also remember some Alan Kay talk where he says something like: "a few hours ago I found Guy Steele in a corridor in this event and we talked about blablabla.....". 100% natural :)

Then, while researching a bit for this post, I browsed wikipedia for Hofstadter. And another "proof" that "among certain level of smartness, there's just 1 degree of separation between any two people".

[...]he organized a larger symposium entitled "Spiritual Robots" at Stanford University, in which he moderated a panel consisting of Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Kevin Kelly, Ralph Merkle, Bill Joy, Frank Drake, John Holland and John Koza.