I would like to thank Jenni Tucker and Linda Gamlin for CB1. The great Chinese poet Li Po led me to my poem beer and pindar. You should not need to understand any of the references in my poem the engineering rush to enjoy the work, unless I’ve messed up. But if you do want to explore:

• The Simulation Argument (www.simulation-argument.com) inspired an engineering rush. It is a creation of the philosopher Nick Bostrom. My sequence includes an inaccurate misinterpretation of this serious work.
• Michio Kaku’s cosmology book Hyperspace (Oxford University Press, 1994) proposes that universes evolve, and suggests some experiments to disprove the theory.
• Most people did not experience English schooling, so they will not know that homework should resonate with stories of England’s King Henry VIII.
• Aeschylus was supposedly killed when an eagle, attempting to break a tortoise by dropping it on rock, dropped it on him instead.
• The Prince was written by the medieval political theorist Machiavelli.
• p–brane theory suggests the universe may exist in a four dimensional membrane, which is a small part of a much larger n–dimensional structure.
• The poem Hymnen is in my collection blue wail and flashing siren.

The poem select mentions that I’ve attended the premier of a piece I believed changed music. That piece was Steve Reich’s Different Trains.

Kernighan & Ritchie (mentioned in Copyleft) create the computer programming language C, and wrote the book. Most Operating Systems, including Windows and Linux, are written in C and its descendant C++.

Like The Iliad, The Mahabharata is the source poem for a great religion. Unlike The Iliad, The Mahabharata’s religion (Hinduism) lives. It’s a pity Hindu bigots seem to have ascendancy in India.