This was a very interesting and thought-provoking book. At times it was very bizarre, and I had a hard time exactly following the flow - but I almost wonder if that was a conscious plan of the author's. The book tried to present information as a type of weaving, and so it could make sense that she purposely constructed her book with a nonlinear flow of logic as to provide a metaphor for a complex woven pattern. There were parts of the book that left me really thinking about my life as a computer scientist, there were parts with interesting facts about various personalities of cs, and there were parts that just left me thinking, where the heck did she come up with that? It was fascinating read though.

    I loved the first part of the book's stories about Ada Lovelace. She was an extremely interesting, slightly crazy personality. Sadie Plant has woven thoughts and quotes of Ada throughout the book, and that is a very strong aspect of the woven nature. She also weaves in pieces from various science fiction books (especially books of William Gibson) and I thought those were not pulled off nearly as well as the pieces about Ada. I also liked that she made the connection to web pages being woven texts, it was a good parallel, both to the style of her book and to the depiction that she presented of the history of women and computers.

    Her presentation of women and men existing in this sort of binary relation disturbed me some. "It takes two to make a binary, but all these pairs are two of a kind, and the kind is always a kind of one. 1 and 0 make another one. Male and female add up to man." Then this whole discussion follows about women as "a hole" or "a nothing" which kind of lost me because I didn't find the original discussion very satisfactory.

    Plant also presents a very interesting section about Alan Turing, who like Ada Lovelace, was very interesting and slightly crazy. The discussion about artificial intelligence and the Turing test was good to read, because it was something that I knew the basics of, but reading Plant's descriptions and quotes from Turing was great. I didn't know that Turing was such a strange person and somehow these facts about him were woven into the book well.

    The book also talks about hysteria a lot. Ada Lovelace was apparently hysteric as was Freud's daughter Anna (an avid weaver) and throughout her book, Plant brings up references to their hysteria and hysteria and its effects on intelligence and self-perception of genius. In a section called "Scattered Brains" Plant is discussing hysteria and focus and concentration and she end the section with this:
        'A 1996 report revealed that men tend to "overwork portions of their brains, killing off a large fraction of the cells in them. Women, on the other hand, seem to think about more things, allowing parts of their brains time to rest. Women may also have another advantage. In general, women have a higher resting pulse rate than men; this translates into a higher rate of blood flowing through the brain. Because of this, even when women are thinking hard, they may be able to clear toxins away more efficiently.'
This report apparently appeared in the Economist magazine, but when I read this all I could think was how ridiculous it sounded to me.

    This book reminded me somewhat of a book that I read last year for my Sociology of Gender class. The book was Gender Outlaw, by Kate Bornstein. Bornstein also writes in this piecewise type fashion, and questions many gender assumptions. Plant talks about "passing" and how gender categories often get blurred. Bornstein also discusses this and how as a child he also did this and often blurred gender divisions. (Kate was a transsexual who was formerly was Al growing up.)

    The last remarkable section of this book was Plant's discussion of Darwin and natural selection. First she talks about animals and how despite the fact that certain features (like a peacock's bright tail) make them vulnerable to predators, these features survive because of sexual selection. She then talks about the chicken and egg type dilemmas and concludes that "the male element is simply an offshoot from a female loop." What amazes me about this section is again the story that she concludes it with. This time the article was from New Scientist and tells of the birth of a young boy from an unfertilized egg. Apparently, this boy had two X-chromosomes but that "except for some learning difficulties and an asymmetrical face - he seems to be a normal three-year-old boy." I have neither heard of this boy before, and so all I could wonder upon reading this was whether or not this story was for real. It seemed too much like something from a supermarket tabloid - but I don't know, I'd have to go back and see what (if anything) was actually published. It just seemed too strange to believe.

    While this is only a brief synopsis of the book, I hope I was able to convey my amazement at many of the facts and opinions presented.  It was a fun and thought-provoking book to read, and I really enjoyed the discussions that I have mentioned above as well as the less astounding ones that just discussed various aspects of computer science like the Internet, neural networks, and artificial intelligence. Although I felt that I had to take much of the information presented with a small grain of a salt, it was none the less informative as well as shocking. And like I mentioned a few times, I really took to the ideas about weaving and communicating and their parallels with computer networks.