Slashdot Mirror

Crichton's crappy novel is called Prey.

It's not good. Characterization, plot, pacing, plausibility, technology. All horrible. Don't buy it. Don't read it.

See the new book GPU Gems 2 for some ideas - looks very promising.

since when has it been cool to post these in the story?

http://service.bfast.com/bfast/click?bfmid=2181&so urceid=39391960&isbn=0689877978
(links to http://search.barnesandnoble.com/bookSearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?sourceid=00393919608443593340&ISBN=06898 77978&bfdate=05-02-2005+13:47:41 ) ..thats going to be a fat chunk of change when the story is through.

*cough*

Or maybe books like Carrie?

Sorry, just found that a bit ironic in this particular thread.

The political economy of the process of IP legislation and internationalization is critical to consider in this context. The construction of these policies have to do with the narrow self-interest of corporate actors and how they are able to sell their case to political policymakers. For example, the conversion of IP law from an abstract problem to a trade issue addressable through the United States Trade Representative office has allowed the US to pursue the IP agenda of large corporate actors outside the bounds of IP-related treaties.

If you are interested, look at this book: Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights, Susan Sell [amazon.com]

It's a great in-depth analysis of this topic and very enlightening for anyone who thinks this debate is somehow easy to understand.

You might consider Barnes & Nobles (hey, at least they're a "blue" corporation, unlike Amazon): Barnes and Nobles: Private Power, Public Law

Alternately you could get it straight from the Cambridge press: Cambridge Press: Private Power, Public Law

They've made the introduction available as a sample chapter: Sample Chapter (PDF): Private Power, Public Law

I have to say, it's a bit mind-numbing -- lots of stuff about GATT and TRIPS and various associations of this and that, and over-all it looks only tangentially on-topic... the question is not why would monopolists try and ram their monopolies down the throat of the entire planet, the question is where the monopolies came from to begin with. Why can the pip-squeak entertainment industry hold the information technology world hostage? Are they better at bribing politicians? Is there some "quid pro quo" going on, e.g. publicity for political campaigns?

[1] Yeah, I know: someone who really understand intellectual property doesn't call it "property", but you know what I mean.

You need to read The Power Game.
Hedrick Smith (no relation) gives you the play-by-play.
Now, you might think it dated, because the play-by-play is of the Reagan era, but the ink is depressingly fresh.
In particular, the chapter entitled "Pentagon Games", where he walks you through the procurement morass, is especially enlightening.
You are definitely right; not all Civil Servants are dumb/bad/incompetent; many sincerely try to do the best they can. As in software, so in bureaucracies: complexity sucks.

Any suggestions on what to tackle next? I really liked set theory, Boolean calculus, and so on (which means the topology book has been really enjoyable so far). My main goal is to be able to read the occasional article on higher math that filters through Slashdot, and the various interesting-looking physics books I find when I make it in to a city with a real bookstore (the best my town has to offer is a Hastings).

I know that the real answer is "whatever I'm interested in", but I haven't been exposed to enough math beyond multivariate calculus to know what I'm interested in. Was there any class you took or book you read that made you look at the world differently or left you hungry for more?

Bookware for various languages:

Living Language

A list of the 'Teach Yourself' Books.

Tuttle Kanji Cards - I have a set of these and they're very nice flashcards.

Free-ish software for Japanese:

Kanji Gold

Tile Tag - Drill game for Japanese kana.

Stuff to pay for:

Multi-Lingual Books - Seem to have a good selection of stuff.

OK... So I myself am interested in Japanese... ;-) However, it does seem to exercise a lot of different portions of your brain, from the pictographic script to the weird (to me!) grammer stuff. However, you should have her pick what she's most interested in, since interest is vital to keeping with a foreign language self-study program.

Another thing you might look at is the game of Go. It seems to be well thought of by various people who should know, and I believe it's even claimed to be effective in staving off such things as Alzheimers. However, the good players say that there's no good computer implementation, so you might have to find her a human opponent.

American Go Association

Good luck!

Disclaimer: I've tried some of these resources, not all. Your mileage may vary. Contents may settle during shipment.

You did say this wasn't directly pointed at me. But I would point out that I did say, and therefore recognize, the question was rhetorical. I just think the argument is more powerful with the actual evidence that 30 seconds of work produced.

(I also thought of the fact that IMDB won't show his books, ghost-written or otherwise, but it took me a bit to find an author search. I don't think Amazon has one, but here's a Barnes and Noble author search for William Shatner, and I'm actually a little surprised. While there are quite a lot of repeats in the 96 results and I'm not about to filter them out, he's got a suprising number of actual books with his name on the cover, and some other interesting things out there.)

I wish I knew how to clean off those pressed fairies that keep flying into the back of my laptop's transparent screen when I'm working down in the garden! Windex and Mr Clean just smear them around, euugh!

And don't anyone start whining about how a movie can never be exactly the same as the novel it's based on -- first of all it was a short story, and second the entire premise of the movie was changed from a logic play on Hofstadterish self-reference to a run-of-the-mill "I was framed!" whodunit.

And don't even get me started on the product placement.

Apple's industrial design team has always been among the best--no, scratch that, the best in the business, and one of the most well-respected among any company. Even during the "dark years", Apple's designers were producing very inventive, elegant and creative objèts. However, most of these projects were axed by upper management, who unfortunately appeared to share the sentiment (popular on Slashdot) that beauty has no place in the computer industry. You can find a sampling of what might have been in the so-so book Appledesign (published 1997, I believe--before the iMac).

A review of some Teaching Company courses is at http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/001767.html and the other courses you were probably refering too are the Portable Professor Series at Barnes & Noble http://btob.barnesandnoble.com/subjects/ref/ref_cd s2.asp?sourceid=00395996645644787198&btob=Y&pid=60 77

I don't know if any of these directly answer your question, but there is a whole raft of available LDAP books from places like B&N: for example here.

I really doubt he will be moving closer to his real source material. If you'd like to see what he orignally wanted to do, check out The Lensman Series, by Doc Smith. Ignore the crap vidio, and the three by David Kyle. He ended up making Star Wars because Smith's daughter didn't understand what he wanted and wouldn't give premission.

So the money comes from commercial concerns and the next thing you know the channel is covering up reports on dangerous products in order to defend a large commercial interest


You should read this book
It covers this story & a lot more interesting stories & coverups - foreword by Gore Vidal.

It may be helpful to mention here that it is common that government agencies try to hide the way they do business. Partly that is for their own convenience. Partly the self-esteem of many government employees is somewhat dependent on the raw, unreasoned power of their agencies. Partly agency employees know the quality of their procedures is low, and don't want them challenged.

The Irony of Democracy is that few people in a democracy actually believe in democratic principles.

The 9/11 bombings gave power to some of the worst elements in the United States.

I hate to have a holier than thou attitude but if you do not have a physics/chemistry background this is very hard to understand and accept. I would strongly recommend the adventures of Mr. Tompkins written by George Gamov (I am sure your local library has copies of this, or the books which form this one's content) for a pedagogical introduction, if you are interested in this. If you let me know what your education and interest level is I can point you to possibly more advanced but more technical texts.

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

I want to recommend Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark. It's sci fi (good /. tie-in), but actually draws on the author's own experience as the parent of an autistic child. Apart from the sci fi plot, which is decent, there are many insights into the thought processes of people with autism. It seems quite consistent with the Guardian article, and is based on current research that the author read about.

The sci fi classic, which is OT for this thread but will be of interest for folks thinking of how to "cure" mental "disabilities," is Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon. It's the diary of a man who starts with a very low IQ, but then is given a medical treatment to "cure" him. A control subject, a mouse named Algernon, is given a similar treatment. The diary follows his vastly increasing intelligence, but then complications set in. A movie called "Charly" was based on the book. Sci fi buffs, and other folks interested in these topics: these titles are highly recommended!

I want to recommend Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark. It's sci fi (good /. tie-in), but actually draws on the author's own experience as the parent of an autistic child. Apart from the sci fi plot, which is decent, there are many insights into the thought processes of people with autism. It seems quite consistent with the Guardian article, and is based on current research that the author read about.

The sci fi classic, which is OT for this thread but will be of interest for folks thinking of how to "cure" mental "disabilities," is Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon. It's the diary of a man who starts with a very low IQ, but then is given a medical treatment to "cure" him. A control subject, a mouse named Algernon, is given a similar treatment. The diary follows his vastly increasing intelligence, but then complications set in. A movie called "Charly" was based on the book. Sci fi buffs, and other folks interested in these topics: these titles are highly recommended!

I have used it as a reference many times when working on Windows programs.

I wouldn't call the Singleton pattern a hack. It can be combined with a Factory pattern. Usually, you only want/need one instance of a particular factory. That's where a singleton comes into play. A static method for a singleton method with a static variable inside to the factory.
This insures that you always know when the static variable is created, and you don't need a specific instance of the class to access to get the factory. You can put the static singleton method in the factory class. Singletons have their place in Software Engineering. Many experts far better developers/Software Engineers than most of us see the value of singletons in the proper place. I would recommend the Gang of Four book Design Patterns for more information on Singletons.

The amount of detail in this series is pretty staggering, spanning literally hundreds of years. They get into some neat ideas, but overall, the entire series is kinda tedious to read. I made it about 100 pages into the third book before I put down the series for good, after reading the first two.

obligatory bn link:
The Mars Series, by Kim Stanley Robinson]

Or this?

Fortunately, the United States Postal Service has already published instructions on how to pack a hippo.

No information on evolutionary history. For that, Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale is highly recommended. Mentions the hippo specifically.

Read some Thomas Kuhn

Fuck Michael Chrichton. Lynn Margulis said this much early in her excelent book Symbiotic Planet.

http://btobsearch.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/is bnInquiry.asp?userid=SV1SsZnAwn&sourceid=003959966 45644787198&btob=Y&isbn=0465072720&itm=3/

Hot air at a given pressure is less dense than cold air. It has a slightly lower refractive index. Around (and especially above) a hot surface, there will be convection currents and mixing of hot and cold air. What this gives you is a volume of air in which the index of refraction is constantly changing both in space and time.

Feynman has a good explanation of the mirage effect in chapter 2 of QED.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691 024170/qid=1105721137/sr=8-9/ref=pd_ka_2/104-21804 78-1633510?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
or http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?userid=ba6JeIlAxb&isbn=0691024170&itm=13

When we started, I desperately wanted to offer a browsing technique that would model "dialing down" a search in a huge library

It's from Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Great book.

Gah. I return my volume of The Complete Shakespeare to the shelf, only to find the novel that I failed to name above:
The Cunning Man
by
Robertson Davies

You can no longer download recent versions of Qt non-commercial Windows edition from TrollTech, but "C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3" ships with a complete version of Qt 3.2 non-commercial Windows edition.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?isbn=0131240722

Ummm...what would its peers be?

Martin Gardner's math puzzle/game books? or mabye Godel, Escher, Bach for the more philosophicaly inclined? Not all non-mathematicians are turned off by math...

Ummm...what would its peers be?

Martin Gardner's math puzzle/game books? or mabye Godel, Escher, Bach for the more philosophicaly inclined? Not all non-mathematicians are turned off by math...

What I'm looking for is a CS (not necessarily just programming) equivalent to Shirley O. Corriher's excellent Cookwise or Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking, a couple of books that teach you about the chemistry of cooking at a very accessible level, in order to teach you how cooking works so you can successfully modify or create your own recipes, and not just giving you a list of recipes to follow.

I suppose that SICP is sort of close, but it's not nearly as accessible as Cookwise (and much more boring)

What I'm looking for is a CS (not necessarily just programming) equivalent to Shirley O. Corriher's excellent Cookwise or Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking, a couple of books that teach you about the chemistry of cooking at a very accessible level, in order to teach you how cooking works so you can successfully modify or create your own recipes, and not just giving you a list of recipes to follow.

I suppose that SICP is sort of close, but it's not nearly as accessible as Cookwise (and much more boring)

What I'm looking for is a CS (not necessarily just programming) equivalent to Shirley O. Corriher's excellent Cookwise or Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking, a couple of books that teach you about the chemistry of cooking at a very accessible level, in order to teach you how cooking works so you can successfully modify or create your own recipes, and not just giving you a list of recipes to follow.

I suppose that SICP is sort of close, but it's not nearly as accessible as Cookwise (and much more boring)

Well, in my experience geeks like Chinese food, so I suggest The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters by the late James McCawley, a linguist and connaisseur of Chinese food. It teaches you to read Chinese menus. Long out of print, it was reprinted last year. You can get it from the publisher (link above) or Barnes and Noble.

You are incorrect in saying that the value of the option at grant is zero. If I flip a coin and you get $1 if heads and 0 if tails, that is worth something to you. An option is the same: you get a payoff if the stock goes up and nothing if the stock goes down. The valuation problem for standard options (like those traded on the CBOE) is well understood. There are tricky issues in applying option pricing to employee options, but their value is emphatically not zero.

While I think this is a bit premature, some of you nay-sayers really need to read Snowcrash. A virtual economy is inevitable, and few stories I've read have captured the awesome potential as well as Snowcrash did.

Bryan

Hang with me for a little while, this may seem disjointed -- but the parent posting actually has far more to teach us about Wikipedia and the nature of internet research than the actual article does. So here are a few observations that might bring my response to this post into context:

A couple days ago I got into a long debate with a PhD candidate/teaching assistant about how to teach an introductory college course on sourcing and reliance on internet materials in an introductory research course. Having taught something similar, I was surprised when she suggested that there is little (perhaps even nothing?) on the internet that can be reliably cited to. Or, to give her more credit (the actual argument was far more nuanced... or at least it seemed so after a couple of beers), her point is that there is always a more authoritative source available than the internet. And since students should be required to cite the most authoritative source they can find, it is extremely rare that the internet copy of a source should be cited to. Citing to the internet, in her opinion, is a crutch for citing to "real" paper publications (or even proprietary internet databases, CD-ROM compilations, etc.)

So while I clicked on the article more out of amusement value then anything else, the parent poster provides an awesome example of the strengths and weaknesses of both arguments. Coming into this thread, I'd heard of the "Children's Crusade" before, but it was just a historical tidbit that I'd picked up somewhere and really knew nothing about.

I was intrigued by the parent post's rather categorical dismissal of two of the three explanations -- and not know what those explanations were -- I clicked through and read the article.

The first paragraph of the article states that "Several conflicting accounts of this event exist, and the facts of the situation continue to be a subject of debate among historians."

Okay. So from the very beginning we know we are dealing with an "event" where the facts are not entirely clear. But scanning the rest of the article, it seems clear that whatever happened happened in the early 13th century.

The first two versions are then laid out. It's a real tear jerker -- young children coming together in a spontaneous uprising to fight the forces of evil -- who then meet a gruesome end. (Sound familiar?.) And it's this version of the story that this painter was thinking about when he put ink-to-canvas or what Kurt Vonnegut was thinking when he subtitled Slaughterhouse-Five "Or, the Children's Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death", or why the term was incorporated into the title of the classic submarine movie Das Boot or why the incomparable Neil Gainman used it as a title for one of his comics.

History is not just comprised of facts. Myths and legands sometimes have a far greater impact on our physche than do Cold Hard Facts. This is a perfect example. This significance of the Children's Crusade is not whether it actually ever happened. The historical "fact" is an interesting academic question that makes for a fun historical sluething exercise.

So, back to the article. After depicting the historically and culturally significant version of the Children's Crusade, the article goes on to say "Some historians speculate that the entire crusade is fiction, as there is no real evidence that any such event occurred, in the 13th or in any other century. Research done in the early 1980s indicates that the Children's Crusade began as a misinterpretation of a 1212 religious movement among the landless poor...

Hang with me for a little while, this may seem disjointed -- but the parent posting actually has far more to teach us about Wikipedia and the nature of internet research than the actual article does. So here are a few observations that might bring my response to this post into context:

A couple days ago I got into a long debate with a PhD candidate/teaching assistant about how to teach an introductory college course on sourcing and reliance on internet materials in an introductory research course. Having taught something similar, I was surprised when she suggested that there is little (perhaps even nothing?) on the internet that can be reliably cited to. Or, to give her more credit (the actual argument was far more nuanced... or at least it seemed so after a couple of beers), her point is that there is always a more authoritative source available than the internet. And since students should be required to cite the most authoritative source they can find, it is extremely rare that the internet copy of a source should be cited to. Citing to the internet, in her opinion, is a crutch for citing to "real" paper publications (or even proprietary internet databases, CD-ROM compilations, etc.)

So while I clicked on the article more out of amusement value then anything else, the parent poster provides an awesome example of the strengths and weaknesses of both arguments. Coming into this thread, I'd heard of the "Children's Crusade" before, but it was just a historical tidbit that I'd picked up somewhere and really knew nothing about.

I was intrigued by the parent post's rather categorical dismissal of two of the three explanations -- and not know what those explanations were -- I clicked through and read the article.

The first paragraph of the article states that "Several conflicting accounts of this event exist, and the facts of the situation continue to be a subject of debate among historians."

Okay. So from the very beginning we know we are dealing with an "event" where the facts are not entirely clear. But scanning the rest of the article, it seems clear that whatever happened happened in the early 13th century.

The first two versions are then laid out. It's a real tear jerker -- young children coming together in a spontaneous uprising to fight the forces of evil -- who then meet a gruesome end. (Sound familiar?.) And it's this version of the story that this painter was thinking about when he put ink-to-canvas or what Kurt Vonnegut was thinking when he subtitled Slaughterhouse-Five "Or, the Children's Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death", or why the term was incorporated into the title of the classic submarine movie Das Boot or why the incomparable Neil Gainman used it as a title for one of his comics.

History is not just comprised of facts. Myths and legands sometimes have a far greater impact on our physche than do Cold Hard Facts. This is a perfect example. This significance of the Children's Crusade is not whether it actually ever happened. The historical "fact" is an interesting academic question that makes for a fun historical sluething exercise.

So, back to the article. After depicting the historically and culturally significant version of the Children's Crusade, the article goes on to say "Some historians speculate that the entire crusade is fiction, as there is no real evidence that any such event occurred, in the 13th or in any other century. Research done in the early 1980s indicates that the Children's Crusade began as a misinterpretation of a 1212 religious movement among the landless poor...

1. Dumbing Us Down
2. Another Gatto book
3. An online write-up
4. Many Children Left Behind.
5. Saving Our Schools

Well, I think Fox has already turned your treatment for The Jungle Book into at least one TV series...

As for Cinderella, you might be interested in the Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. An absolutely smashing retelling of Cinderella from the viewpoint of the stepsisters. No product placement in this one.

By the same author, and something I'm very surprised hasn't been mentioned so far, is Wicked, which isn't darker per se, but it is an outstanding novel, being in the main the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Somewhere, somewhen a green girlchild was born, and things can only go downhill from there. The treatment of the political situation in Oz during the Wizard's reign is quite interesting, if only for being considered at all.

This has already been adapted for Broadway, one wishes the movie rights get acted on quickly to pre-empt this inevitable train-wreck of a project.

Well, I think Fox has already turned your treatment for The Jungle Book into at least one TV series...

As for Cinderella, you might be interested in the Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. An absolutely smashing retelling of Cinderella from the viewpoint of the stepsisters. No product placement in this one.

By the same author, and something I'm very surprised hasn't been mentioned so far, is Wicked, which isn't darker per se, but it is an outstanding novel, being in the main the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Somewhere, somewhen a green girlchild was born, and things can only go downhill from there. The treatment of the political situation in Oz during the Wizard's reign is quite interesting, if only for being considered at all.

This has already been adapted for Broadway, one wishes the movie rights get acted on quickly to pre-empt this inevitable train-wreck of a project.

oh, and you can find the whole series here

I think this is the latest:

here

How to understand the presidential election results.

If you haven't read any books about U.S. politics, then you probably don't know much about the activities of the U.S. government.

You cannot rely for information on TV or newspapers, or any advertising-supported media. Advertising-supported media exists to make money, not to inform. Advertisers are understandably careful not to alienate anyone. It is not possible to develop an accurate opinion of government activities only by listening to the carefully crafted phrases from media employees who would lose their jobs if they seemed to indicate a preference for one candidate over another.

It's a fact that Bush supporters often have a poor understanding of his actions rather than what he wants people to believe. One example of support for this is the following article: Bush Supporters Misread Many of His Foreign Policy Positions.

The U.S. government is corrupted by extreme conflict of interest. Please don't moderate this down just because you disagree. I can support my position with links to 3 movies and 35 books: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.

For a quicker overview, see this article: 100 Facts and 1 Opinion -- The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration.

The county-by-county results showing not only who won, but the number, are extremely interesting. So is the USA Today result map. They show what might be expected. Those who live in rural counties vote for Bush. In the past century, the more intelligent, educated, and ambitious people have migrated away from the farms to places with more opportunities. The less educated have stayed behind. Those who live in rural counties are less likely to read, and therefore are not well-informed.

Those who don't read are fooled by Karl Rove's lies. Here are books about Karl Rove's methods:

Boy Genius: Karl Rove, The brains behind the remarkable political triumph of George W. Bush by Lou Dubose, Jan Reid, and Carl M. Cannon, 2003, PublicAffairs. Reviews: Powell's Barnes & Noble Amazon

Part of the secret of Karl Rove's success is that U.S. voters don't want to believe there is widespread corruption in their government. Lies that are extreme and unrelenting enough are accepted.

President George W. Bush has a habit of giving disrespectful nicknames to those with whom he works. "Boy Genius" is one of Mr. Bush's nicknames for Karl Rove. Mr. Bush also calls Karl Rove, "Turd Blossom". The term refers to a flower that grows in the feces of a cow.

Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove made George W. Bush presidential by James Moore and Wayne Slater, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, New York, New York, USA. Reviews: Powell's Barnes & Noble Amazon

One of the Amazon reviews quotes the book: "Karl Rove matters to all Americans, many who have never even heard his name. While the president chafes at the description of Rove as 'Bush's Brain,' he can hardly deny that every policy

How to understand the presidential election results.

If you haven't read any books about U.S. politics, then you probably don't know much about the activities of the U.S. government.

You cannot rely for information on TV or newspapers, or any advertising-supported media. Advertising-supported media exists to make money, not to inform. Advertisers are understandably careful not to alienate anyone. It is not possible to develop an accurate opinion of government activities only by listening to the carefully crafted phrases from media employees who would lose their jobs if they seemed to indicate a preference for one candidate over another.

It's a fact that Bush supporters often have a poor understanding of his actions rather than what he wants people to believe. One example of support for this is the following article: Bush Supporters Misread Many of His Foreign Policy Positions.

The U.S. government is corrupted by extreme conflict of interest. Please don't moderate this down just because you disagree. I can support my position with links to 3 movies and 35 books: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.

For a quicker overview, see this article: 100 Facts and 1 Opinion -- The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration.

The county-by-county results showing not only who won, but the number, are extremely interesting. So is the USA Today result map. They show what might be expected. Those who live in rural counties vote for Bush. In the past century, the more intelligent, educated, and ambitious people have migrated away from the farms to places with more opportunities. The less educated have stayed behind. Those who live in rural counties are less likely to read, and therefore are not well-informed.

Those who don't read are fooled by Karl Rove's lies. Here are books about Karl Rove's methods:

Boy Genius: Karl Rove, The brains behind the remarkable political triumph of George W. Bush by Lou Dubose, Jan Reid, and Carl M. Cannon, 2003, PublicAffairs. Reviews: Powell's Barnes & Noble Amazon

Part of the secret of Karl Rove's success is that U.S. voters don't want to believe there is widespread corruption in their government. Lies that are extreme and unrelenting enough are accepted.

President George W. Bush has a habit of giving disrespectful nicknames to those with whom he works. "Boy Genius" is one of Mr. Bush's nicknames for Karl Rove. Mr. Bush also calls Karl Rove, "Turd Blossom". The term refers to a flower that grows in the feces of a cow.

Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove made George W. Bush presidential by James Moore and Wayne Slater, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, New York, New York, USA. Reviews: Powell's Barnes & Noble Amazon

One of the Amazon reviews quotes the book: "Karl Rove matters to all Americans, many who have never even heard his name. While the president chafes at the description of Rove as 'Bush's Brain,' he can hardly deny that every policy