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Tell that to Dan Brown.

Are you referring to Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code ? Sure, he's got a wife, but only because he ended up marrying someone who's even more of a kook than he is. I'm not sure that's something to be proud of, really.

You know, this bit of news doesn't seem so bad - or at least unexpected - after I came across this today. The review is priceless.
Priceless like plastic pink flamingos.

Basically, yes. Imho the pope resembles the emperor more closely, though. But hey, it's hollywood.. Angelina Jolie looks nothing like a hacker either.

Actually it is a misconception that adoption is cheaper and easier. Average adoption costs are $12k US.

Not to mention that immense emotional toll of binding the resulting family together. You essentially need a therapist's help, and even then results aren't guaranteed.

girls aren't passing you up

sure sure, change the subject so that it's all about me - even though you don't know anything about me.

For your information, I was paraphrasing Richard Dawkins, who happens to be an eminent scientist -perhaps THE world authority on evolution. I'm pretty sure he knows what he's talking about. I actually got his example slightly incorrect though. The example he used was not peacocks, it was widow birds. They have, he says, such long tails for one reason and one reason only, because females like it. Here is the book I got this from:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393315703/002-69 24972-0945613?v=glance&n=283155

Read it yourself. Educate yourself on the topic before you try to debate it. His other book, The Selfish Gene is excellent too.

cannot be captured in a cover letter, interview, or golf outing, but in one's day-to-day commitment to the work. If that passion is the one which his managers look for then I am certain that your 'Bob' would find himself well rewarded.

And that is where the problem lies -- where lesser companies take, say, Apple as an example but completely misinterpret the idea and begin hiring the least qualified people based upon such subjective intangibles as passion. I can see 'Bob' easily getting sidelined -- Showing up for work every day and getting the job done isn't passionate. It's the Dilbert principle in full effect.

Given some time, eggs may also be made as well as sperm from stem cells, and homosexual male couples can also have biological children with the help of a woman to carry the fetus.

These are all excellent books.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735619034/ (ASP.NET 1.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201760401/ (ASP.NET 1.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735621764/ (ASP.NET 2.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735621772/ (ASP.NET 2.x)

These are all excellent books.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735619034/ (ASP.NET 1.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201760401/ (ASP.NET 1.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735621764/ (ASP.NET 2.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735621772/ (ASP.NET 2.x)

These are all excellent books.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735619034/ (ASP.NET 1.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201760401/ (ASP.NET 1.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735621764/ (ASP.NET 2.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735621772/ (ASP.NET 2.x)

These are all excellent books.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735619034/ (ASP.NET 1.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201760401/ (ASP.NET 1.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735621764/ (ASP.NET 2.x)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735621772/ (ASP.NET 2.x)

You don't have to.

You can get the web edition server for less than $400 USD.

I can usually buy two or three of those with the money that I save in development time. Your results might vary, everybody likes something different. If I had to buy 50 of those then I might consider using something like JBOSS or LAMP.

Having used wxPython for just a few small projects, and currently one very large one, I found that the book was appropriate for someone who was just getting started. WxWidgets and wxPython can do much more than this book would suggest.

I keep it on my bookshelf next to the wxWidgets book and end up reaching for the wxWidgets book more often, even though I'm using wxPython.

I agree with the other poster who suggests that people code GUIs with sizers instead of using the XRC resources, although if you have multiple people on a project, and one or two want to change just the GUI, then the XRC, along with Dialog Blocks would be a perfect combination. The trick to making the gui stuff quick even though it's in code is to configure your favorite text editor with snippets or aliases or whatever it calls them to have lots of fill-in the blanks templates for things like a staticText / Edit box row in a dialog. I have a good collection of VisualSlickedit aliases I'd be happy to send to anyone who e-mails me at: jim at maplesong dot com.

wxPython is easy to debug too. I'm coding my application partially in C++ wxWidgets, and driving the complex gui parts in wxPython. I have my wxPython extension dll in a visual studio project, and I point the "when debugging run:" to python itself, with an argument that points to my script. I can set breakpoints in my C++ code, and they are hit when I get to the right place in the wxPython gui. I can simutaneously use Wing IDE from Wingware to debug the python code. The trick is the python actually initiates the conversation with the debugger through sockets... the debugger just has to be in 'passive mode' to accept the connection.

Unlike the other posters, I have not run into anything buggy. Everything has been solid, and has made sense, and for the most part worked the first time every time, even mostly on OSX. (I start off on Windows.) The only troule I've had on Linux/GTK is controlling the font size in the HTML windows. (wxWidgets has a simple but fantastically useful lightweight HTML layout widget!)

I'm really hoping that Google comes around to putting some support into wxWidgets & wxPython. It already has great support from Mitch Kaypor and the OSAF, and AOL has used it for their communicator, and lots and lots of small shops have used it successfully, as well as several open source projects... Ok, it's doing fine.

-Jim

Because most of the other bindings I've seen are pretty simple wrappers, and often direct tranlsations of the C++ library, you should just grab yourself a copy of the original wxWidgets book, which has been around now for a year or so:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0131473816/sr=8-1 /qid=1152602802/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-8482942-0491367?i e=UTF8.

It's very comprehensive, well written, and even for wxPython, which at times tends to do things a little differently, I was happily using this until a couple of months ago when my copy of the wxPython book reviewed here arrived.

There are apocryphal anecdotes that the crew of the Apollo missions were issued poison pins laced with cyanide just in case they could not get into a proper reentry slot and skipped off into space for eternity.

The stories aren't apocryphal.

In the prologue to his autobiography Apollo 13 (formerly titled "Lost Moon"), Jim Lovell writes:

Stories about poison pills always made Jim Lovell laugh. Poison pills! Forget about it! There just weren't any situations in which you'd ever really consider making, well, an early exit. And even if there were, you had lots of easier ways to do it than poison pills. The command module did have a crank for the cabin vent, after all.

So according to him the stories are false.

You can read the book online at Amazon (go to "Search inside", do a search for "Prologue", then click on the only result you get). The first three pages are also available at ImageShack: page 1, page 2, page 3.

Read Shantaram written by Gregory David Roberts. I think that he is one of very few western people who truly understands the Indian psyche. You also get a cracking good read - I am a SF/F fan and had to be coerced by a friend into reading this book - and it turned out to be one of the best I have ever read.

Save yourself $18.48 by buying the book here: WxPython in Action. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $18.97, or 38.57%!

Save yourself $18.48 by buying the book here: WxPython in Action. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $18.97, or 38.57%!

I have to admit, I don't see the need for these recent whizbang's additions to the spam-fighting repertoire. Sure, they might be ingenious, but on a practical level they don't do anything more than a properly-configured SpamAssassin system. I used to get a lot of spam coming through a default installation of SpamAssassin, but after spending some time with O'Reilly's book (the free docs may already be up to this level of reader-friendliness, it's been a couple of years) and tweaking my installation, I get spam once in a blue moon. There's just no need for anything more.

The other one is Mrs. Hawking.

The first daughter came before Einstein and Mileva married, which is why she disappeared. The assumption is that she was put up for adoption to avoid scandal. No one knows for sure what happened to her.

There's even a book about it.

For those not simply trolling, another who thinks religion and science and well connected is Gerald Schroeder, who wrote an excellent couple of books on the subject. My favorite is The Science of God. Schroeder is an Israeli physicist (MIT educated if memory serves), and Genesis scholar.

His main assertions are that neither top scientists nor top theologians often understand the other, and that much of the debate stems from dogged stubornness in current beliefs - think of how the Catholic Church once thought it heresy to teach the heliocentric instead of the geocentric universe, when today we know that it's really all just a matter of perspective, but that centering the universe on Earth or the Sun is not such a great idea. He really knows his science (leaves you behind very quickly if you don't grasp relativity and cosmology well, but kindly gives you a warning before diving into the particulars) and Genesis, and tries not to take a stand on one explanation or another - simply says the two aren't incompatible, especially if you acknowledge that the point of both is to seek the truth (or Truth, your choice).

One hopes that the discovery of new correspondence will result in some more up-to-date biographies. My favourite, Albrecht Folsing's Albert Einstein: A Biography is only 13 years old, but recent archival findings suggest a need for an update, and these letters reinforce the need all the more.

Personally, I'd like a biography that focuses more on Einstein's role in the Cold War. Was he really a moonbat like some conservatives now accuse?

Try reading The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201328402/sr=8-1 /qid=1152552266/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0473258-2303213?i e=UTF8. I have not yet read it but it is a non-specialst account of something from nothing

Is there a distinction between faith you can't prove to yourself because it's not proveable (metaphysics),

It's not that metaphysics are unproveable, just that there's not currently an accepted theoretical framework that allows for the phenomena observed.

For example, MythBusters tested Paul H. Smith & his claim to be able to teach "remote viewing". Materialist scientists scoff at the notion that a human could get information about a distant location with hokey 'psychic' skills, because there's no allowance in their model of the universe of a mechanism that allows for the transference of said information. But, as the Mythbusters found in the show, there's something to the practice.

It was pointed out to me that even the scientists now say that matter-as-we-know-it only makes up 4-7% of the universe. The rest is classified as "dark matter" and "dark energy", and said dark-stuff "interpenetrates" everything else. 'Dark energy' could very well be the vector that explains the how & why of so-called psychic phenomena.

I'm currently working on Lynne McTaggart's The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, which covers more on the energy of empty space. She's a science reporter, and the first 100 pages are on the historical progression of interest in the subject.

Dr. Krauss's book is actually called The Physics of Star Trek and has a forward written by Stephen Hawking.

Moral issues aside, willfully engaging in behavior contrary to basic biological drives (reproduction) indicates something seriously wrong with an individual. It's a trait which, if present in all members of a species, would result in the death of said species very quickly. There are obviously benefits to marriage - if there weren't, homosexuals (presumably) wouldn't seek it. Given that marriage is an artificial construct created by society, why should society provide such advantages to behavior which it finds to be detrimental to it?

Wow. This is so ridiculous that I suspect you're trolling, but just in case somebody believes this stuff, let's try a few facts.

One, that something is natural does not make it right. Violence (in particular, male violence) is clearly natural; see Wrangham's Demonic Males for a good summary and pointers to the research. The next time I hear somebody spout the naturallistic fallacy at me, I'm going to give 'em one in the snoot. Pow! My anger will be entirely natural, so I'm sure they'll be fine with it.

Two, there appears to be no risk that everybody will suddenly turn gay and stop having kids if we allow civil unions, so the end-of-the-species argument makes no sense. Is the ability to get married all that keeps you chasing pussy? I hope not, but if so, find a therapist and ask about projection.

Third, if behavior contrary to basic biological drives indicates pathology, then you have much bigger problems than homosexuals. 98 percent of US women who have had sex have used contreception. And god knows how many people have had oral sex, gone on a diet, or worked third shift.

Fourth, if marriage without children is a problem, why not start with the straight childless couples? There are a lot more of them. And shouldn't you be a lot more worried about organizations that promote a child-free lifestyle for straights?

Fifth, homosexuals have kids. I know that fundies are often a little confused by this, but think of it this way: if artificial insemination was good enough for Baby Jesus, it can work for others. And gosh golly, some families with kids would like to get married. Why stop them?

There is always a dialectic between the arts and the sciences. Human understanding is not rigid, and I believe that the one informs the other, and vice-versa. It wasn't until I read Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid that I started to develop a passion for logic and mathematics. A work of art turned me on the beauty of a terse and rigorous proof.

By "Pet Sematary" did you mean...?

But, how does getting an abortion physically harm you? How does it "punch you in the nose" so to speak?
Well, that's s simple one - it's all about control. With the right to abortion in place, a man can't control whether a woman will bear "his" child. To some men not having that kind of control is "a punch in the nose". You might want to read Pauls Auster's Moon Palace - where this topic also plays a role at some point.

(Posting anonymously for obvious reasons. Read on ...)

I can't comment on Carly as a CEO since I never worked at HP. However, I can comment on Mark Hurd's past career.

Mark took the helm at NCR after being groomed by Lars Nyberg, one of the worst CEO's NCR had in its 130+ years. Lars came to power following another (perhaps worse) CEO, Jerre Stead. Jerre was a televangelist type who was all showmanship and nothing else. He tried the motivational angle, and co-authored a book (Flight of the Buffalo) with another corporate consultant (Jim Belasco).

This was when NCR was an AT&T company. Jerre jumped ship when the numbers were really going south, leaving the company for a year in the hands of someone from AT&T who did not care, and fled to the mother ship as soon as the trivestiture (where AT&T spun off Lucent and NCR) was announced.

Lars was a cost cutter in the real sense of the word. He shutdown or sold much of NCR's computer division to focus on ATMs, Point of Sale and Teradata. We froze development on NCR's UNIX SVR4, and stopped making PCs, servers and pretty much anything in generic computing. Teradata has been bought by NCR when AT&T took over, and had really neat technology, albeit a niche market (decision support).

Lars made Mark Hurd head of Teradata, after being in sales for 20+ years. We kept hearing every quarter and year: Teradata is our flagship product, Teradata will pickup, Teradata will change things, Teradata this, Teradata that ... All under Mark's leadship.

The stock value under Lars continued to languish, and while tech companies were making money from the bubble, NCR was stagnating (we did not capitalize on our presence in banks, ...etc.)

A few years ago, Lars was evicated by the board (remained on the board) and Mark replaced him. The word in the company from people who worked under him is that he "decided to be a rock star".

Hurd co-authored a seemingly content-free book with his mentor Lars Nyberg. Here is a brief on the book The Value Factor: How Global Leaders Use Information for Growth and Competitive Advantage, and here is the Amazon link. The Register made fun of it because it had things in it like "information isn't aligned". The book is of course influenced by Teradata being the information store of a corporation, and how it can be analyzed and capitalized on. It must have helped advertise Teradata too.

To his credit, NCR's stock climbed and even split under Hurd, in stark contrast with the Nyberg era. This may be due to his rock star approach and getting more media and analyst attention.

NCR's size is about the size of HP's printer division alone. HP is too big for Mark, around 10X as big.

So, Mark cannot take all the credit. His advent may have boosted morale in HP because Carly was much hated, but her strategies are the ones in effect today (merger with Compaq, ...etc.)

See here.

The folks at Sysinternals, in collaboration with folks from M$, literally wrote the book on it:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735619174/102-36 15859-8238512?v=glance&n=283155

(I'm sure that even if you don't want to buy the hardcover version you can find a soft copy on a pirate site or newsgroup somewhere...)

      -D

The Indian nobel laurelate Amartya Sen made the point that the literacy rate in India is much lower than the literacy in the east asian countries such as China, and therefore the chinese factory workers has ended up being more valuable than the Indian factory workers. On the contrary India has a lot of well-weducated people. As a result of this difference the cheap plastic industry has ended up in China whereas the Indian economic growth is centered around a comparatively small middle class. In other words the lack of investment in education of the poor has lead to inequality. I warmly recommend Sen's book

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199257493/qid=11 52349068

On the contrary I recently heard a talk of Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who was one of the arcitects behind the Indian move towards market economy in the 1980's. He said that according to some of the standard measures of inequeality the inequality is India has not been rising. Here is a summary of a similar speach

http://info.worldbank.org/etools/BSPAN/Presentatio nView.asp?PID=1069&EID=328

Personally, I don't know what to believe. Perhaps some Indian slashdot readers can enlighten me.

So, they bought up all of Acclaim's useless crap... good for them!

Couldn't they at least have gotten Turok or NBA Jam or Mortal Kombat?

I can't even imagine what their plans are for these properties, but then, I also can't imagine who came up with the fantastic idea to buy up an anthropomorphic mascot character who couldn't compete with Bubsy, a shoddy Wipeout clone and a terrible beach volleyball game whose actual volleyball aspect couldn't even compete with a game whose sole purpose was to make 14 year old boys "manipulate their joysticks" with one hand.

Coming up on Slashdot: "Better deal: PlayStation 3 or 530 cans of Pimpjuice"?

I forgot the links.

Critical Thinking Web Site

Book on Critical Thinking

The answer is this: walk away.

That's it. Just walk away. We need to give up this ridiculous and disastrous clinging to a way of life that is not sustainable. We are a tribe who has conquered the Earth, and believes that it has the right to go right on conquering. And we say "Oh, things suck right now? That's just cause we haven't conquered /enough/ yet. That's right. We just have to have more control. Then it'll alllll be better. Onward Christian soldiers."

This is not to say that there isn't a way human societies and tribes can work together to move forward in our knowledge and make life better for all. But we have to realize that where we are now is not better. And we all have to realize it. Without every member of our tribe coming to this realization together, the few still believing in these ways will only rise to try to conquer it all over again.

We are not the only humans to try this way of life that we've lived for the last 8-10 thousand years. The Anasazi tried it. The ancient Mayas tried it. They were smarter than us. They said, "Ok, we gave it a shot, but this sucks. Screw it." And they went back to living in ways that worked. Maybe many generations down the line they'll try a new way of structuring societies. And maybe that will work out better. Maybe not. But there's /no hurry/.

At any rate, I don't have any specific answers for how we can survive the next hundred years. How each person lives should be the way that works for them. But I do have a way we can not survive the next hundred. And that's the way we're going right now.

I talk about this author a lot, but only because I believe he introduces these ideas in a very clear and understandable way. I recommend this book highly. At least give the excerpt a shot.

Slashdot is probably not the best place to be trying to put these ideas forward. But by the gods, I'll tell it to anyone who will listen.

Tilting at windmills always,
userlame

As for birthcontrol - why (unless the couple is not ready for children yet..)?? Space is just that - space, lots of it. With asteroid belt having an entire planet disassembled into small nice pieces with huge surface area.

People who feel that the Earth is becoming overpopulated don't see colonization as a real cure. Even if you avoided the problem of cost-to-orbit with rockets by constructing space elevators, at this rate you would never be able to move more people off the planet than are being born on it. (This unpleasant fact is a big plot element of Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars ). Therefore, many see birth control as the only way to minimize what they feel is an undesirably large terrestrial population.

Although the only way to make it really work would be to have forced abortions a la the Chinese authoritarian state. I've seen this advocated before among Slashdot comments. It's ironic that the same community which often tends toward a libertarian view of restricting government power has those who want the government to get into the business of abortion.

Finally, someone makes sense.

Regardless of race, it is very widely held that the economic status of your parents is the best indicator of your ecomonic success. And the importance of this link has been increasing over the last few decades.

Also, studies show that there is much less class mobility than the average american believes.

Check the book, Class Matters, if you are interested.

Funny, I never hear complaining about the legacy scholarship quotas, put in place for the upper class. Heck how did you think George Bush got his Harvard degree?

I don't have the book at hand, so I can't give you an exact citation, but in Noakes' Lore of Running (I have the 1991 edition), he notes that high-altitude training has been shown mainly to benefit athletes who compete at altitude, but that the benefits of training at high altitude and competing at sea level are small enough to be disputable. He adds that after the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, where U.S. runners were thrashed due to heat and altitude, U.S. runners picked up altitude training, but that the data that they've accumlated since then has lead them to believe that you really should tailor your training to the venue. If you enjoy training or exercise science, pick up this excellent book.

TFA sounds like scrum in some regards -- the setup of the feature list, the short implementation horizon. Especially the idea that you define features that will not be included, which suggests that the immediate development is only part of a process that will be repeated in the future to add more features. Repeat what's described in TFA every month and you're even closer to scrum.

I have seen great projects, OK projects, and the-worst-projects-ever-created. This article points out some good tips, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. The best thing you can hope for when faced with an impossible schedule is to communicate with management, and not just with bitching about how they setup an impossible schedule, but offer solutions that are logical, like reducing scope, throwing more money at it, slipping schedule, reducing quality, or yes even canceling the project!
Want some good (aka REAL) tips, check out Steve McConnel's book on Rapid Development (Ignore the fact that it is produced by M$ press). This book is great, and if anyone is serious about software development they should read this book. And for the developers out there, please read his other book, Code Complete.

I have seen great projects, OK projects, and the-worst-projects-ever-created. This article points out some good tips, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. The best thing you can hope for when faced with an impossible schedule is to communicate with management, and not just with bitching about how they setup an impossible schedule, but offer solutions that are logical, like reducing scope, throwing more money at it, slipping schedule, reducing quality, or yes even canceling the project!
Want some good (aka REAL) tips, check out Steve McConnel's book on Rapid Development (Ignore the fact that it is produced by M$ press). This book is great, and if anyone is serious about software development they should read this book. And for the developers out there, please read his other book, Code Complete.

From architect on up, one of your key job responsibilities is to push back on features, schedules and so on, and to set expectations right from the get-go. Early on, I used to laugh out loud when being told proposed dates by marketing. That didn't go over too well, of course, so I've adopted a more diplomatic way of saying 'no' since. :-)

The gist of it is that many executives believe in Spanish management (very well explained in Peopleware). This boils down to setting ridiculous schedules, asking for continuous overtime, etc. The idea being that every minute an engineer spends more will get the product out the door faster. Of course, this is not the case as Peopleware will tell you in great detail. It is also matched by my own experience.

However, if you push back with data in hand (such as a detailed sizing) and a constructive proposal what to do differently, you may very well end up with a more reasonable schedule, a good product and happiness all around.

A few more gems in Peopleware:

• Schedules are counterproductive. Teams that don't have schedules ouperform those that do by up to 50%.
• Overtime is only productive for one week.
• Cubicles are sinkholes of effectiveness. Why do Microsoft and IBM only have offices for engineers?

For those of you with a humorous bent, I highly recommend checking out Joel Spolsky's articles on project management. A few highlights:

• Human task switching considered harmful
• Joel's test to identify bad software companies

If you can get to a reasonable schedule (by way of reducing features, adding time or people), the TFA is a bit limited in its scope. I have a few recommendations that have worked for me in the past (your mileage will vary, and you should read Peopleware anyway):

• You need to have the spec in writing.
• You need to use source control, even as a single developer.
• You need to have a single button build.
• When the build breaks you roll back the change that broke it or you stop everything until it is fixed.
• You need to build daily. Or better yet, continuously.
• Unit tests are your friend. They're less useful on GUIs but for logic they're a godsend. Personally, I can crank out high quality code about twice as fast with unit tests (if you consider debug time). Reduced maintenance and improved sleep is a bonus.
• In the same vein - automated system testing (if possible) is a wonderful way to improve shipped quality. Your testers (if you have any) cannot test everything.
• Code reviews are great. We use code reviewer with great impact on code quality.
• Hire the best people only and fire those you have no hope of redeeming. It may sound harsh, but allowing an ineffective developer to remain on a team is a great way to kill both the team and the project.
• You must have a bug tracking system.

For centrifuged chickens, Great Mambo Chicken And The Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis. For horny Superman, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex by Larry Niven.

For some reason "Impossible Schedule" in software development means cutting corners instead of increasing manpower.

Because that's all you can do (in general). Adding man-power to a late software project only makes it later, as was shown by Brooks some 30 years ago.

If you want to read more details, use the "Inside Book" search on Amazon within the Great Mambo Chicken.

From the search results link above, visit pages 54 and 55 - the sidebars navigate to the next and previous pages.

No I have no affilate link in there (that I am aware of) - call me crazy.

The book mentioned in TFA is Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition - Science Slightly Over the Edge by Ed Regis. It's a little dated now but it is an entertaining introduction to fields such as cryonics and nanotechnology.

I was thinking also of the Jinxians from Larry Niven's "Known Space" universe. First introduced in the novel World of Ptaavs (now in print as part of the Three Books of Known Space omnibus), the Jinxians are short and stocky from growing up on a world with gravity much higher than on Earth. The same planet of Jinx gives us the "bandersnatchi", one of Niven's most interesting alien race, who are not only massively mascular from the gravity, but have been genetically engineered to have chromosomes much larger than that of humans in order to protect against cosmic radiation.