Nobody told you that YOU had to use the CueCat for your library. Those of us normal human beings, who also read our books, like having a way to catalog them. www.readerware.com happens to be an easy way to do that, among others I'm sure.
USE A GODDAMN SPELL CHECKER YOU FOOLS! The typos in this review are EMBARASSING.
Re:What bookstore are you from?
on
Star In A Jar
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· Score: 1
As much as I hate to egg on an AC, I just couldn't let this lie:
You just don't get it do you! There are more kinds of truth than the scientific or historical. The purpose of the Bible is not to
relate historical truth but spiritual truth and philosophy. Would you not agree that philosophy holds truth beyond the scope of
science?
Telling us to study scripture instead of working on science has nothing to do with the qualities (or lack thereof) of philosophical truth in said scripture. Instead, it expresses the backwards attitude that "There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know", which honestly I just don't agree with. It was a troll, of course, but it was written as a dismissive statement that implied that one couldn't study scripture, or have any kind of "relationship" with the "true" God and still want to know how these things worked. Which is utter BS. There *are* religious scientists who study all kinds of interesting things (aside from the fact that the examples given weren't really representative--Einstein was NOT an Orthodox Jew, for example), and I have no problem with that.
What I "don't get" is why ignorant people have to try to act as if religion and science oppose each other--they only do so inasmuch as the ignorant members of a religion fear challenges to that ignorance.
Re:I'm tired of the argument
on
Star In A Jar
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· Score: 1
How in your cool intelectual atheism did you ever miss that?
Where did I say I was an atheist? Much less cool...:-)
As for being wound up, being deliberately misconstrued frequently winds me up. The original poster said that Einstein was an Orthodox Jew, when he very obviously and plainly wasn't. You proceed to try to defend that viewpoint as if saying someone is an Orthodox Jew is only a matter of interpretation of what "Orthodox Jew" means--the fact is, "Orthodox Jew" has about as much room for interpretation as the word "is"; in other words, next to none. Had you simply pointed out the agnostic quote to begin with, to disagree with my statement of atheism, we wouldn't have had this exchange, ya think? My main point that Einstein absolutely in no way can be considered an Orthodox Jew stands.
Re:What bookstore are you from?
on
Star In A Jar
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· Score: 1
So as someone who has definitely read "the literature in question" (aka the Old Testament), will you listen if I tell you that the Bible, generally speaking, is a work of middle eastern fiction? Just because it has historical facts (that one may or may not believe are accurate) in it doesn't make it a history text, any more than a James Michener novel.
As you say, it's easy to "arbitrarily believe", but it doesn't mean that it holds any weight in the real world.
Re:I'm tired of the argument
on
Star In A Jar
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· Score: 1
1) If you bothered to read the quotes I posted, BY HIS OWN WORDS he said "I do not believe in
a personal God." And "From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist."
2) *I'm* not the one who said that he was an Orthodox/Zionist Jew. He was NOT an Orthodox Jew by *any* definition of that term. So I'm not "hung up" on orthodoxy, I'm simply saying that anyone who claims he was an Orthodox Jew was full of BS.
Got it yet?
Re:I'm tired of the argument
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 1
When you claim someone is an Orthodox Jew, you are making a very specific claim. Your own reference makes it clear that he was NOT an Orthodox Jew, because he only observed the Law for a brief period (and isn't even clear on whether he went beyond the dietary requirements). So what exactly is the problem here? He was not a believer in a personal, personified God, which by the teachings of most of the religions today, and definitely by the teachings of the religions he was claimed to hold, makes him an atheist. What's to argue about?
Re:Anti-progress vs. anti-culture
on
Star In A Jar
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· Score: 3
Albert Einstein: Orthodox/Zionist Jew who dicscovered and described the Photoelectric effect.
Bullshit. Einstein was in religious terms an atheist, and insofar as he said things like "I don't belive God plays dice with the universe" etc. he was not talking about a "personal God" in any religious sense. I suspect the same is true of Galileo. As for Sir Isaac, he was well known as a mystic and dabbler in secret societies, so his views were certainly not "orthodox", protestant though they may have been.
Here are some quotes to make my point about Einstein:
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious
convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do
not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have
expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called
religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of
the world so far as our science can reveal it. [Albert Einstein,
1954, from Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas
and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press]
What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can
comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking
person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious
feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. [Albert Einstein]
You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific
minds without a religious feeling of his own. But it is different
from the religiosity of the naive man. For the latter, God is a
being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one
fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for
its father, a being to whom one stands, so to speak, in a personal
relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe. But the
scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation...
There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human
affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous
amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an
intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the
systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly
insignificant reflection... It is beyond question closely akin to
that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.
[Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934]
I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a
Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to
tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I
am, of course, and have always been an atheist. [Albert Einstein
to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a
Jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism. Article
by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997]
I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal
God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not
share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor
is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of
religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude
of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual
understanding of nature and of our own being. [Albert Einstein to
Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949, from article by Michael R.
Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997]
The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am
unable to take seriously. [Albert Einstein, letter to Hoffman and
Dukas, 1946]
I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and
punishes evil. [Albert Einstein, as quoted in a memoir by Life
editory William Miller in Life, May 2, 1955]
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider
ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman
authority behind it. [Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by
Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, and published by Princeton
University Press.]
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures,
or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither
can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives
his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism,
cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the
eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the
marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the
devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of
the Reason that manifests itself in nature. [Albert Einstein, The
World as I See It]
there is a large audience of
people who do not want their news sanitized for them
No, I don't think the libertarian audience really is that big.
Oh, you mean conservatives? Those bastions of "fact" that in some cases rely on Rush Limbaugh for "news", when he's repeatedly been caught in flagrant opposition to the facts (and waves such things away since he's only entertainment after all)?
Sorry, but everyone, right left and center, tends to gravitate towards views of the news that reinforce their own world view, and so towards anything that is "sanitized" in the direction that they want to hear. It's human nature. To claim that liberals are all for censored news, but the freedom loving (ha!) conservatives want everything to be told is to ignore all kinds of conservative whitewash.
people who want the honest truth about the socialist and homosexual
communities
You want the honest truth about "the homosexual community"? Here it is: gay people want to be allowed to express themselves and love whoever it is they love without fearing that their jobs, their homes, and their lives may be taken from them by people who are afraid of them because they are different. Just like the italian community, the puerto rican community, the asian community, and every damn other community in this country.
Unfortunately, some people who have to have a "them" to be against have to invent moronic evil agendas that bear only fleeting resemblance to reality so they can feel justified in having no sympathy when those they fear "get what they deserve." "But we weren't really advocating violence against them." As Dogbert says: "Bah!"
With this statement you've demonstrated exactly how "objective" the news you consume is--no more than that on Salon etc., just better targeted at the prejudices of the majority.
With conservatives running the show in Washington, the country is beginning to gravitate back towards its moral roots.
Those puritan roots are what you're talking about? Never mind the convicts and other criminals that also helped establish the colonies...
And of course, this trend toward our puritan roots is why rude rap songs about sex, teenaged slut pop and online pr0n are doing so well....>coff<.
The fact is, Suck & Feed had little to nothing with being "mouthpieces for the liberal left", and inasmuch as Salon & Slate do, their failures have nothing to do their ideology and everything to do with the fact that banner ads just don't support a website unless they're porn ads.
How about another web magazine that somewhat disproves Jon Katz's poorly thought out premise? Nerve! They seem to be doing well, they're definitely not conservative, and their main selling point seems to be that they are just respectable enough to not be dismissed as pr0n while still appealing enough to that same part of people to be successful.
Unfortunately, the number of professors who are competent to teach lisp/scheme/etc are limited by the difficulty of the language. While this is not typically a problem at a large university, it would be debilitating at a small one if this were made some kind of requirement.
The prime example I have of this is the small midwestern private school I graduated from. I took an AI course where we were supposed to be learning lisp. After the second week of class, when the professor showed us two syntatically identical lists and said that in one the end parentheses went away and in the other they didn't but couldn't explain how the machine was smart enough to discern the difference, I dropped it. I can't think of any of the other CompSci professors in the department that I would have expected to be any better either (I knew one who was still trying to use antique print control codes on a laser printer connected to a Unix system).
The problem with this "good weed out gimmick" is that it would have weeded out the entire faculty too. And the fact is, good quality faculty are hard to come by...
It's a shame that Scalia isn't consistently a strict constructioninst. I am glad he was able to lead the court to this decision, but I think he's led them to plenty of overstepping of bounds also. How about that decision to interfere in Florida Electoral procedures? That doesn't seem to be very strictly constructionist.
It's probably worth noting that RSI's are not confined to "tech" industries either. My wife's father had surgery to both his wrists for carpal tunnel somewhere over a decade ago. His job? Stocker at a grocery store. I don't think he would have put himself through the pain of that surgery for a "hoax" either.
Actually, I was amazed that the member of parliament judging the 2000th dish show last night did say "it's not particularly impressive" about one of the french team's dishes. He was pressed to give his opinion and was kind of defensive about it, but still....
You can be as insulting as you like, but you're basically spouting the same empty philosophical arguments that aren't doing a lot to convince anyone who's not already convinced. "Sharing" sounds nice and all, but it leaves the average business person looking around for support and "a throat to choke" when things break. You can't choke a group of 100 developers working for a dozen different companies, and many of the control freak bean counters (aka capitalist pigs in this discussion) don't like that surrender to the good nature of those people.
Before you assume that I'm an idiot who either "doesn't get it" or claims that OSS is "bad for companies", perhaps you should look for where I said any of this was what I believed. I'm simply pointing out that your philosophical position is nice and all (and I even agree with most of it) but that doesn't make the engine go. The control freaks, bean counters, and their ilk do, and you have to convince THEM in the terms THEY understand, not with hand waving platitudes. Get your attitude chip off your shoulder or nobody who matters is going to take you seriously (assuming they aren't outright offended by your condescension).
I think the point is that if there is no benefit to the capitalist pigs of the world, and I think we all agree that they have an overbalanced degree of control of the workings of the world, then Open Source will remain a fringe thing that many people get use out of, but never actually gets anywhere.
Telling us what we already know about why some people don't like or do like OSS still begs the question: Where's the money to make this machine go?
great dissing of neural
nets, genetic algorithms and statistical methods
Of course Minsky is still at this, he's made a career of it (ever hear of _Perceptrons_?) It's a shame that his approach hasn't generated significantly more success in understanding "mind" than the neural net folks, isn't it?
Let's say this. At various points, I have had significant back pain that didn't seem to be just going away. I went to a Chiropractor, who adjusted my back, and I felt immediate relief. Not feeling obligated to do any long-term adjustments, I went on with my life.
Are you saying that this relief was provided by quackery? If so, more power to the ducks.
As an additional reference point, while I never went this route, my father went to a "neurologist" or whatever the official MD is that is supposed to help deal with such things when he had similar problems. This "non quack" did nothing more than drug him up so that he couldn't feel the pain (and couldn't really function correctly in other ways). Getting sick of the drugs, he went to a Chiropractor, and got fixed up.
I don't have problems often, but when I do, over-the-counter Orudis KT (which is ketoprofen) works amazingly well. If you have problem often, I'd recommend a chiropractor.
Until you EXPLICITLY spilled the beans, there was no inkling what exactly the reviewer meant by "Son or Sons". Good job of doing exactly what you were bitching about.
Not fair, but not for your reasons....
on
Thief of Time
·
· Score: 3
Oh PLEASE.
I am sad to see Mr. Adams gone too, but his handful of books were largely rushed at the end. In particular I wanted to throw the last Dirk Gently book out a nearby window when I got to the end and it tied up a mystery in 3 pages without bothering to tell ME clearly what the solution was (I'm not dense, if it was obvious to anyone I have no clue how). He had a great sense of a scene and humor, but not of novel writing.
Pratchett, on the other hand, knows how to plot a book. Beginning/Middle/End, tension/release, etc. He does an excellent job. Sometimes his plots or characters end up a bit thin, but I can only think of one or two of the 26 Discworld books that I felt I had to *work* at reading, and the vast majority of them have been complete joys to read.
Bottom line: it's quality, not quantity, that counts, and Pratchett manages excellent quality, in many cases surpassing any of Adams' work.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody told you that YOU had to use the CueCat for your library. Those of us normal human beings, who also read our books, like having a way to catalog them. www.readerware.com happens to be an easy way to do that, among others I'm sure.
USE A GODDAMN SPELL CHECKER YOU FOOLS! The typos in this review are EMBARASSING.
You just don't get it do you! There are more kinds of truth than the scientific or historical. The purpose of the Bible is not to relate historical truth but spiritual truth and philosophy. Would you not agree that philosophy holds truth beyond the scope of science?
Telling us to study scripture instead of working on science has nothing to do with the qualities (or lack thereof) of philosophical truth in said scripture. Instead, it expresses the backwards attitude that "There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know", which honestly I just don't agree with. It was a troll, of course, but it was written as a dismissive statement that implied that one couldn't study scripture, or have any kind of "relationship" with the "true" God and still want to know how these things worked. Which is utter BS. There *are* religious scientists who study all kinds of interesting things (aside from the fact that the examples given weren't really representative--Einstein was NOT an Orthodox Jew, for example), and I have no problem with that.
What I "don't get" is why ignorant people have to try to act as if religion and science oppose each other--they only do so inasmuch as the ignorant members of a religion fear challenges to that ignorance.
Where did I say I was an atheist? Much less cool... :-)
As for being wound up, being deliberately misconstrued frequently winds me up. The original poster said that Einstein was an Orthodox Jew, when he very obviously and plainly wasn't. You proceed to try to defend that viewpoint as if saying someone is an Orthodox Jew is only a matter of interpretation of what "Orthodox Jew" means--the fact is, "Orthodox Jew" has about as much room for interpretation as the word "is"; in other words, next to none. Had you simply pointed out the agnostic quote to begin with, to disagree with my statement of atheism, we wouldn't have had this exchange, ya think? My main point that Einstein absolutely in no way can be considered an Orthodox Jew stands.
As you say, it's easy to "arbitrarily believe", but it doesn't mean that it holds any weight in the real world.
2) *I'm* not the one who said that he was an Orthodox/Zionist Jew. He was NOT an Orthodox Jew by *any* definition of that term. So I'm not "hung up" on orthodoxy, I'm simply saying that anyone who claims he was an Orthodox Jew was full of BS.
Got it yet?
When you claim someone is an Orthodox Jew, you are making a very specific claim. Your own reference makes it clear that he was NOT an Orthodox Jew, because he only observed the Law for a brief period (and isn't even clear on whether he went beyond the dietary requirements). So what exactly is the problem here? He was not a believer in a personal, personified God, which by the teachings of most of the religions today, and definitely by the teachings of the religions he was claimed to hold, makes him an atheist. What's to argue about?
Bullshit. Einstein was in religious terms an atheist, and insofar as he said things like "I don't belive God plays dice with the universe" etc. he was not talking about a "personal God" in any religious sense. I suspect the same is true of Galileo. As for Sir Isaac, he was well known as a mystic and dabbler in secret societies, so his views were certainly not "orthodox", protestant though they may have been.
Here are some quotes to make my point about Einstein:
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
[Albert Einstein, 1954, from Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press]
What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
[Albert Einstein]
You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religiosity of the naive man. For the latter, God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands, so to speak, in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe. But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation... There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection... It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.
[Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934]
I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.
[Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a Jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism. Article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997]
I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
[Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949, from article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997]
The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.
[Albert Einstein, letter to Hoffman and Dukas, 1946]
I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.
[Albert Einstein, as quoted in a memoir by Life editory William Miller in Life, May 2, 1955]
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
[Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, and published by Princeton University Press.]
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
[Albert Einstein, The World as I See It]
http://atheism.about.com/religion/atheism/library/ quotes/bl_q_AEinstein.htm
No, I don't think the libertarian audience really is that big.
Oh, you mean conservatives? Those bastions of "fact" that in some cases rely on Rush Limbaugh for "news", when he's repeatedly been caught in flagrant opposition to the facts (and waves such things away since he's only entertainment after all)?
Sorry, but everyone, right left and center, tends to gravitate towards views of the news that reinforce their own world view, and so towards anything that is "sanitized" in the direction that they want to hear. It's human nature. To claim that liberals are all for censored news, but the freedom loving (ha!) conservatives want everything to be told is to ignore all kinds of conservative whitewash.
people who want the honest truth about the socialist and homosexual communities
You want the honest truth about "the homosexual community"? Here it is: gay people want to be allowed to express themselves and love whoever it is they love without fearing that their jobs, their homes, and their lives may be taken from them by people who are afraid of them because they are different. Just like the italian community, the puerto rican community, the asian community, and every damn other community in this country.
Unfortunately, some people who have to have a "them" to be against have to invent moronic evil agendas that bear only fleeting resemblance to reality so they can feel justified in having no sympathy when those they fear "get what they deserve." "But we weren't really advocating violence against them." As Dogbert says: "Bah!"
With this statement you've demonstrated exactly how "objective" the news you consume is--no more than that on Salon etc., just better targeted at the prejudices of the majority.
With conservatives running the show in Washington, the country is beginning to gravitate back towards its moral roots.
Those puritan roots are what you're talking about? Never mind the convicts and other criminals that also helped establish the colonies...
And of course, this trend toward our puritan roots is why rude rap songs about sex, teenaged slut pop and online pr0n are doing so well....>coff<.
The fact is, Suck & Feed had little to nothing with being "mouthpieces for the liberal left", and inasmuch as Salon & Slate do, their failures have nothing to do their ideology and everything to do with the fact that banner ads just don't support a website unless they're porn ads.
How about another web magazine that somewhat disproves Jon Katz's poorly thought out premise? Nerve! They seem to be doing well, they're definitely not conservative, and their main selling point seems to be that they are just respectable enough to not be dismissed as pr0n while still appealing enough to that same part of people to be successful.
The prime example I have of this is the small midwestern private school I graduated from. I took an AI course where we were supposed to be learning lisp. After the second week of class, when the professor showed us two syntatically identical lists and said that in one the end parentheses went away and in the other they didn't but couldn't explain how the machine was smart enough to discern the difference, I dropped it. I can't think of any of the other CompSci professors in the department that I would have expected to be any better either (I knew one who was still trying to use antique print control codes on a laser printer connected to a Unix system).
The problem with this "good weed out gimmick" is that it would have weeded out the entire faculty too. And the fact is, good quality faculty are hard to come by...
Wasn't that how we were supposed to stop SPAM? It doesn't seem to be working. I suspect that this wouldn't work either.
I still want to play Half-Life on the billboard sized "monitor" along 101 in the bay area (not far from SFO).
It's a shame that Scalia isn't consistently a strict constructioninst. I am glad he was able to lead the court to this decision, but I think he's led them to plenty of overstepping of bounds also. How about that decision to interfere in Florida Electoral procedures? That doesn't seem to be very strictly constructionist.
It's probably worth noting that RSI's are not confined to "tech" industries either. My wife's father had surgery to both his wrists for carpal tunnel somewhere over a decade ago. His job? Stocker at a grocery store. I don't think he would have put himself through the pain of that surgery for a "hoax" either.
Actually, I was amazed that the member of parliament judging the 2000th dish show last night did say "it's not particularly impressive" about one of the french team's dishes. He was pressed to give his opinion and was kind of defensive about it, but still....
Spoken like a true armchair expert. So tell us, what was YOUR direct experience of sex in space like?
Before you assume that I'm an idiot who either "doesn't get it" or claims that OSS is "bad for companies", perhaps you should look for where I said any of this was what I believed. I'm simply pointing out that your philosophical position is nice and all (and I even agree with most of it) but that doesn't make the engine go. The control freaks, bean counters, and their ilk do, and you have to convince THEM in the terms THEY understand, not with hand waving platitudes. Get your attitude chip off your shoulder or nobody who matters is going to take you seriously (assuming they aren't outright offended by your condescension).
Someone please mod this up, it's hilarious and true.
Telling us what we already know about why some people don't like or do like OSS still begs the question: Where's the money to make this machine go?
Of course Minsky is still at this, he's made a career of it (ever hear of _Perceptrons_?) It's a shame that his approach hasn't generated significantly more success in understanding "mind" than the neural net folks, isn't it?
Are you saying that this relief was provided by quackery? If so, more power to the ducks.
As an additional reference point, while I never went this route, my father went to a "neurologist" or whatever the official MD is that is supposed to help deal with such things when he had similar problems. This "non quack" did nothing more than drug him up so that he couldn't feel the pain (and couldn't really function correctly in other ways). Getting sick of the drugs, he went to a Chiropractor, and got fixed up.
So tell me again, who's the quack?
I don't have problems often, but when I do, over-the-counter Orudis KT (which is ketoprofen) works amazingly well. If you have problem often, I'd recommend a chiropractor.
Until you EXPLICITLY spilled the beans, there was no inkling what exactly the reviewer meant by "Son or Sons". Good job of doing exactly what you were bitching about.
I am sad to see Mr. Adams gone too, but his handful of books were largely rushed at the end. In particular I wanted to throw the last Dirk Gently book out a nearby window when I got to the end and it tied up a mystery in 3 pages without bothering to tell ME clearly what the solution was (I'm not dense, if it was obvious to anyone I have no clue how). He had a great sense of a scene and humor, but not of novel writing.
Pratchett, on the other hand, knows how to plot a book. Beginning/Middle/End, tension/release, etc. He does an excellent job. Sometimes his plots or characters end up a bit thin, but I can only think of one or two of the 26 Discworld books that I felt I had to *work* at reading, and the vast majority of them have been complete joys to read.
Bottom line: it's quality, not quantity, that counts, and Pratchett manages excellent quality, in many cases surpassing any of Adams' work.