Indeed.
Some academic with too much time on his hands wrote an entire Ph.D thesis on that very idea [hint: me :-)] http://33bits.org/about/
Some academic with too much time on his hands wrote an entire Ph.D thesis on that very idea [hint: me :-)] http://33bits.org/about/
I'm browsing through there and see you've got good coverage on HN already. Is your thesis available publicly anywhere? I'd be interested in reading the full-strength version.
The rest of my thesis is (almost literally) a concatenation of several of my papers, most of which I've covered on my blog; a quick list is here: http://randomwalker.info/publications/