computational linguistics (semantics, spam filters, speech recognition, the structure of narratives), hybrid theories, hybrid engines, faulty voting machines, paranoid androids, tattooed "dirt fags", velorutionaries, and people who transform the science world into works of art.
Everyman's Library Pocket Poets. That McSweeney guy.
Haven't been keeping up with it lately, but -
in the past couple years:
Arcade Fire, Iron and Wine, Interpol, Junior Senior, Amon Tobin.
Forever:
Air, Built to Spill, Caribou, Neutral Milk Hotel, Nina Simone, P.J. Harvey, Tom Waits.
The Royal Tenenbaums, Female Trouble.
Zombies, robots, time travel, and anything on its opening weekend (even if it sucks, the audience is always great.)
Battlestar Galactica, Weeds, Boingboing.net, Slashdot, LinguistList... is there anyone who doesn't read Craigslist?
Fiction:
queer monkey-wrenching Chuck Palahniuk;
epic-tone-poem Invisible Cities,
heartbreaking The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
and (my tattoo inspiration) labyrinthine The Name of the Rose;
outrageous Geek Love;
dreamy To The Lighthouse;
inspiring Blue Mars.
Nonfic: broad-scope popscience like The Moral Animal, Nonzero, The Language Instinct, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Consilience, and all the others.
Handy: the Perl Cookbook, Make magazine, and every issue of the Farmer's Almanac.
(That's right, I can tell time on a clear night.)
Alan Turing, Linus Pauling, Steven Pinker, Kim Stanley Robinson, and my uncle, the space-age NASA engineer who worked at Mission Control on the Apollo missions in the 1960s. Far out!