I did the same think in high school (blow off the homework, study a little, make A's and B's. This *killed me* in college when it was apparent that practice was important in being able to pass exams. In high school, topics were beaten into the ground -- you had to be asleep not to let it all seep in. In college, new concepts are introduced at each class period and its up to you to work enough problems to be proficient.
I had this problem in physics, also. I read a lot of science books and I understood most of the physics concepts so well that I didn't work many homework problems. Come exam time, I would be trying to re-derive basic principles since I hadn't learned the practical way of solving the problems.
My daughter is in the 6th grade. Most of the time, her homework is basic drill and practice and occasionally I have to teach (or reteach) basic concepts. Sometimes it is just busywork (make a poster about the rules of divisibility -- graded more on neatness and artistic concept, since the text of the poster (the rules themselves) is printed in the textbook). These "touchy-feely" busywork projects annoy me, since a good portion of *my* hometime is spent helping the kids with homework, or at least looking over their shoulders to make sure they do it and do it right.
Which leads to the final problem with homework -- I am sure that my wife and I spend much more time with our kids on their homework than most parents do (my wife teaches high school).
Read this back in elementary school. Danny Dunn invents a remotely piloted robotic dragonfly with telepresence. He uses it to spy on girls showering after P.E.. Well, actually I forgot what he used it for, but it was cool when I read it...
The shots of Naboo in Episode I really amazed me. I was really impressed that CGI techniques had improved so much. Then I saw a behind the scenes shot of an ILM tech standing inside astride the incredible miniature of the city. What really made the difference was using the CGI techniques to "touch up" the model -- adding moving trees, realistic water, people and vehicles.
The overhead shot of the Titanic was similar -- great ship model, CGI water and digitially composed passengers combined into a very realistic shot.
It's a long way from Logan's Run where a great miniature city was ruined by the scaling effect of the water. I understand that they used to use alcohol or other lower viscosity fluids, but it still never looked right.
I used to regularly achieve a Zen-like state when playing the Robotron arcade game. As a matter of fact, Robotron plays heavily into my desire to create a MAME cabinet with two high quality (read: heavy and reliable) joysticks.
Or "The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents" by Terry Pratchett. I'm reading it now. Pratchett's rats get big brains by eating from the garbage pile behind the Unseen University, but, in typical Pratchett fashion, they not only get intelligence, but also get ethics and religion in the bargain.
Note that this isn't entirely off-topic. Although the book is a fantasy marketed toward teens and pre-teens, it actually addresses many issues in AI, animal rights, ethics, religion and bioengineering. Of course, if you've read other Discworld novels, you would know that already...
Re:Spielberg annoys to the end
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 1
One interesting point about the ending:
According to Moriarty at Ain't It Cool, one suble way the movie deviated from the script was that, originally, the last text on the movie screen was "The next year, there were 168 murders in the District of Columbia". This would have defused quite a bit of the sappiness of the ending.
I liked the movie quite a bit. The product placements were interesting in that these companies shelled out a lot of money and then their placements were used in a scary and disturbing fashion.
One other thing I disliked about the ending was that it was one of those "There are some things people just aren't supposed to mess with, so we're going to forget it ever happened" endings. Jurassic Park had the same ending -- gee, these dinos were hard to control and killed people, therefore we need to forget this technology of resurrecting extinct creatures through cloning. You know, the same way we've forgotten how to make nuclear weapons and nerve gas. Or how we never clone humans or use genetic information for eugenics. Yeah, right.
My college roommate ate on about $0.50 per day -- bowl of Captain Crunch (economy size box) for breakfast, half a box of mac and cheese for lunch, the other half for supper, one or two multi-vitamins a day to make it a "balanced meal". Of course, that doesn't count the several gallons of beer on weekends.
That's actually more than I expected. Judging from the result on the screen and a bit of reading between the lines in the "Making of" special on the Episode I DVD, it seems to me that Lucas is so sold on his digitial techniques that he didn't/doesn't care at all about what he gets "in camera" in the shooting stage because he thinks that he can "fix" it all in post-production.
I get this image of Lucas shooting Episode III in a big soundstage with just his digitial cameras and a lot of blue-screens (actors optional), just panning, zooming, and shooting hours of footage of nothing and letting ILM fill in the details.
I had a weird experience the other day. I picked up my cordless phone (which my daughter uses way too much and never hangs up to recharge), dialed a number and, just as it was connecting, the battery went dead. I hung it up and went to my corded phone and the line was dead. Ditto for my other corded phones and for my cordless when then battery recharged. Eventually, I called the phone company on my celluar phone and the tech said to unplug all of the phones in my house, wait 15-20 minutes, then plug one corded phone in and see if it worked. At first I thought this was one of those "put your phone in a plastic bag because we are going to blow the dust out of the phone lines", so I just waited for the amount of time with the phones hung up. Didn't work. Unplugged them all but one (that I forgot about), didn't work. Finally unplugged them all, waited 15 minutes, plugged on in and, bingo, it worked now. This has made me paranoid about using the portable with weak batteries.
Does anyone know the explaination for why this left my line hanging? It doesn't happen when the phone goes dead during a conversation, only when it is connecting.
If you are looking at the ESRI offerings, Modeling Our World (ISBN: 1-879102-62-5) is a pretty good introduction to ESRI's technologies for GIS.
My company develops GIS applications for utilities (power, water, sewer, gas, etc.) and we are an ESRI business partner, and I am a former Intergraph employee, so I won't get into who's best/worst in the business discussion.
I will say that GIS is a pretty wide open field, since very few colleges have undergraduate GIS programs and what most people need to find good jobs in the field is GIS combined with a solid Computer Science background. ArcInfo/ArcMap/SDE/ArcIMS give you the tools to "do" GIS, but they do require training and good knowledge of fundamental GIS principles. To create systems that combine GIS with day-to-day operations, you need to be able to customize these tools and/or create new applications that utilize these tools, which requires a combination of Computer Science and GIS (or a steep learning curve of on-the-job training).
If your GIS applications are strictly "in-house", you have much wider choices. ESRI has a lot of marketing and inertia behind their products, so you will find many GIS houses with an strong devotion to ESRI as a "standard" and many commercial data sources are going to be oriented toward that "standard".
I've always said that I trust secure web transactions more than I trust giving my credit card to a waiter and having him carry it into the back of the store for five minutes.
When I was in Paris last month, I was, at the time, pleasantly surprised that every cafe or restaurant I went to had wireless credit/debit card readers that they carried to your table so that the card never left your sight. These may be in use more in the U.S., but I don't think I've seen them.
Do these European devices have decent security, or would I have been better off giving Pierre the card to use on a wired reader?
My friends and I were addicted to M.U.L.E. for quite a while. To me, what it had going for it was:
simple mechanics -- you do everything with a four position, single button joystick, including the auction.
great multiplayer -- we would make under-the-table deals with each other to help out or team up against another player. It was like mini-Diplomacy. The fact that it could get your blood boiling while involving no violence whatsoever (unless you got in a fist fight with your friends) is amazing. Double-crossing, deliberate sabotage, "let's team up and beat the computer", etc.
just enough randomness -- to make you cuss like a sailor when your MULE wandered off or a storm disrupted your production on a crucial turn. That's actually what I remember most, cussing the game and cussing each other - there was more trash talk than an Unreal Tournament marathon.
the auction -- the cleanest implementation of an auction I have ever seen. It was great to run the price up on commodities and listen to everyone bitch and moan, or step back and starve the other players.
I'm sure I'm looking back at it through rose colored glasses, but if it has network multiplayer, I may lose my job:-)
That's along the lines of what I was thinking -- if you don't want to rip down signs and you don't want to put up signs of your own, just have a self-inking rubber stamp made that says: "This piece of ugly litter brought to you by Herbalife" and stamp every sign you see.
Re:Its no more a known fact than time travel
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
Sorry to reply to myself, but something else occurred to me. The other central paradox is that I could invent a time machine and send it back in time to myself along with instructions on how to invent it. Therefore, if time travel is possible, a time machine could (and would) invent itself.
Re:Its no more a known fact than time travel
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
I personally subscribe to the theory that time travel causes different, splintering time lines to form. This negates the proof that time travel is impossible, since we haven't be visited by time travellers from the future. Instead, we all live in the time line that hasn't been visited, although there are many, many other "we"s that have live in timelines where we have been visited. Its a variation on the anthropic principle.
BTW, my favorite time travel story was in one of the Stainless Steel Rat books. Slippery Jim and Co. are trapped in an inescapable cliffhanger. Suddenly, he gets an idea and at that instant, a time machine appears before him and they jump in and travel forward to the future to the lab of a friend of his who invented a time machine, then they step out and send the machine back to rescue themselves. That, in itself, is the type of paradox which makes time travel extremely unlikely, if not physically impossible.
Or better yet, read all of Paradise Lost. The best thing I can say about His Dark Materials was that it led me to read Paradise Lost. Milton did it much better than Pullman. As others have mentioned, the first book is great, but the series collapses under its own illogic.
If any of the religious zealots who burn Harry Potter sat down and read His Dark Materials, they would probably want to burn Pullman at the stake.
I don't know about that. As other posters have pointed out, you can get fired at a bookstore for taking home coverless books.
When I worked as a stock clerk at the now defunct TG&Y stores, we had to destroy paperbacks. Our boss would watch us take off the covers and throw them in the dumpster. One of the assistant managers would let us de-cover the ones we want them and stack them beside the dumpster (particularly if there was one he wanted) and we could swing around after the store closed and pick them up, but we were warned that officially we could be fired and the store sued if we were caught...
Of course, the only problem is that you have to have accurate census and location information for every butterfly on the face of the planet in order for the forecast to be accurate.
As I mentioned in a previous comment, I think a nice high resolution picture of a cloudswept blue and green plant around, relatively, nearby star would probably be enough -- I just hate that I probably won't be around to find out what it discovers.
Well, I'm no expert (I'm not even an amateur), but I have heard that an array of optical telescopes (particularly if they could be placed on a solid airless body like the moon) could have the ability to optically resolve planets around other stars.
This would be an expensive undertaking, but it would resolve the issue pretty quickly. I think that positive confirmation of extrasolar Earth-like planets would be an amazing, culture changing phenomena, right up there with actually discovering extraterrestrial life.
PI think my info on optical telescope arrays came from Entering Space by Zubrin.
Back in college I worked for a desktop publishing/copy/printing company and one of things we did was prepare resume packages for people, including mail-merged cover letters. We would type and copy the resume with cover letters for something like $30 for 20 copies. We had a guy come in who was graduating from vet school and he wanted to be a Kentucky race horse vet, so he obtained a mailing list of every horse breeder in Kentucky and paid us to type in the list (he didn't have it in electronic format) and generate over 200 resumes with mail merged cover letters then mailed all 200+ of them. It cost him a few hundred dollars and out of 200 mailings, he got like 20 offers and just picked the best one. I think that in my career, I've maybe submitted 20 resumes and got three different jobs from them.
While I agree that Quake/Unreal are just fun, violent, eye-candy, there are some great games in the FPS genre. Half-Life and System Shock 2 both have good puzzles (not just the "find the key to open the door"), suspense, and strategic elements.
How the web has changed how I do things
on
The End of Cyber BS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The two most fundamental impacts the 'net and the web have had on me and my family is communications and access to information.
The first is a no-brainer, I've never been a letter writer (the postal kind) and with our busy schedules, the chances of catching an old friend who lives in the same city, much less the ones scattered across the country, on the phone is vanishly slim. Via e-mail (I know, I know, it ain't the web, but now it is ubiquitous enough that just about everyone I know has e-mail) I am almost daily contact with a bunch of people I haven't seen in years (and a few I've never met face-to-face).
I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to go back to not having the WWW to access almost any kind of information quickly. Flip by a movie and see an actor, but you can't remember his name? Look up the movie in the TV listings, then hit the IMDB to find out. Want to know what's playing at the theater? You don't have to buy a paper or listen to the theater recording (if you can get through). Need to know an obscure fact? Want to find out how to fix your clothes dryer? Looking for a copy of "The Night Before Christmas" to read to your kids on the night before Christmas? Want to look up and purchase an obscure, out of print book? Want to read a three week old article from a foreign newspaper?
These are everyday uses of the net that people already take for granted. News, sex, and retailing doesn't cover it by a long shot. These are fundamental changes in the way we do things and interact with others...
Ya know, I'm sure this comment will be taken wrong and I will be flamed for saying it, but I think the Pullman books may be a bit too controversial for many young readers. I read them and enjoyed the hell out of them, but I don't think my daughter (who has read the Harry Potter books numerous times) is ready for the theology behind Pullman's books.
I'm not a very religious person (skeptic), but I know a lot of religious people that might severely curtail their children's reading if they have read the Pullman books. I know that literature is a great forum for "dangerous" ideas. The HP phenomena has been a great boost for children's reading around the world, despite an opposition to the occult content of the books. Pullman's portrayal of the Christian God as a dottering old man and Lucifer as an hero/anti-hero was a bit disturbing, particularly for a children's book.
Go ahead and flame me, but I'm saving them for when my kids get older and I'm glad I read them before I gave them to my daughter.
Slashdot Mirror
I did the same think in high school (blow off the homework, study a little, make A's and B's. This *killed me* in college when it was apparent that practice was important in being able to pass exams. In high school, topics were beaten into the ground -- you had to be asleep not to let it all seep in. In college, new concepts are introduced at each class period and its up to you to work enough problems to be proficient.
I had this problem in physics, also. I read a lot of science books and I understood most of the physics concepts so well that I didn't work many homework problems. Come exam time, I would be trying to re-derive basic principles since I hadn't learned the practical way of solving the problems.
My daughter is in the 6th grade. Most of the time, her homework is basic drill and practice and occasionally I have to teach (or reteach) basic concepts. Sometimes it is just busywork (make a poster about the rules of divisibility -- graded more on neatness and artistic concept, since the text of the poster (the rules themselves) is printed in the textbook). These "touchy-feely" busywork projects annoy me, since a good portion of *my* hometime is spent helping the kids with homework, or at least looking over their shoulders to make sure they do it and do it right.
Which leads to the final problem with homework -- I am sure that my wife and I spend much more time with our kids on their homework than most parents do (my wife teaches high school).
Read this back in elementary school. Danny Dunn invents a remotely piloted robotic dragonfly with telepresence. He uses it to spy on girls showering after P.E.. Well, actually I forgot what he used it for, but it was cool when I read it...
The shots of Naboo in Episode I really amazed me. I was really impressed that CGI techniques had improved so much. Then I saw a behind the scenes shot of an ILM tech standing inside astride the incredible miniature of the city. What really made the difference was using the CGI techniques to "touch up" the model -- adding moving trees, realistic water, people and vehicles.
The overhead shot of the Titanic was similar -- great ship model, CGI water and digitially composed passengers combined into a very realistic shot.
It's a long way from Logan's Run where a great miniature city was ruined by the scaling effect of the water. I understand that they used to use alcohol or other lower viscosity fluids, but it still never looked right.
I used to regularly achieve a Zen-like state when playing the Robotron arcade game. As a matter of fact, Robotron plays heavily into my desire to create a MAME cabinet with two high quality (read: heavy and reliable) joysticks.
Or "The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents" by Terry Pratchett. I'm reading it now. Pratchett's rats get big brains by eating from the garbage pile behind the Unseen University, but, in typical Pratchett fashion, they not only get intelligence, but also get ethics and religion in the bargain.
Note that this isn't entirely off-topic. Although the book is a fantasy marketed toward teens and pre-teens, it actually addresses many issues in AI, animal rights, ethics, religion and bioengineering. Of course, if you've read other Discworld novels, you would know that already...
One interesting point about the ending:
According to Moriarty at Ain't It Cool, one suble way the movie deviated from the script was that, originally, the last text on the movie screen was "The next year, there were 168 murders in the District of Columbia". This would have defused quite a bit of the sappiness of the ending.
I liked the movie quite a bit. The product placements were interesting in that these companies shelled out a lot of money and then their placements were used in a scary and disturbing fashion.
One other thing I disliked about the ending was that it was one of those "There are some things people just aren't supposed to mess with, so we're going to forget it ever happened" endings. Jurassic Park had the same ending -- gee, these dinos were hard to control and killed people, therefore we need to forget this technology of resurrecting extinct creatures through cloning. You know, the same way we've forgotten how to make nuclear weapons and nerve gas. Or how we never clone humans or use genetic information for eugenics. Yeah, right.
My college roommate ate on about $0.50 per day -- bowl of Captain Crunch (economy size box) for breakfast, half a box of mac and cheese for lunch, the other half for supper, one or two multi-vitamins a day to make it a "balanced meal". Of course, that doesn't count the several gallons of beer on weekends.
That's actually more than I expected. Judging from the result on the screen and a bit of reading between the lines in the "Making of" special on the Episode I DVD, it seems to me that Lucas is so sold on his digitial techniques that he didn't/doesn't care at all about what he gets "in camera" in the shooting stage because he thinks that he can "fix" it all in post-production.
I get this image of Lucas shooting Episode III in a big soundstage with just his digitial cameras and a lot of blue-screens (actors optional), just panning, zooming, and shooting hours of footage of nothing and letting ILM fill in the details.
I had a weird experience the other day. I picked up my cordless phone (which my daughter uses way too much and never hangs up to recharge), dialed a number and, just as it was connecting, the battery went dead. I hung it up and went to my corded phone and the line was dead. Ditto for my other corded phones and for my cordless when then battery recharged. Eventually, I called the phone company on my celluar phone and the tech said to unplug all of the phones in my house, wait 15-20 minutes, then plug one corded phone in and see if it worked. At first I thought this was one of those "put your phone in a plastic bag because we are going to blow the dust out of the phone lines", so I just waited for the amount of time with the phones hung up. Didn't work. Unplugged them all but one (that I forgot about), didn't work. Finally unplugged them all, waited 15 minutes, plugged on in and, bingo, it worked now. This has made me paranoid about using the portable with weak batteries.
Does anyone know the explaination for why this left my line hanging? It doesn't happen when the phone goes dead during a conversation, only when it is connecting.
If you are looking at the ESRI offerings, Modeling Our World (ISBN: 1-879102-62-5) is a pretty good introduction to ESRI's technologies for GIS.
My company develops GIS applications for utilities (power, water, sewer, gas, etc.) and we are an ESRI business partner, and I am a former Intergraph employee, so I won't get into who's best/worst in the business discussion.
I will say that GIS is a pretty wide open field, since very few colleges have undergraduate GIS programs and what most people need to find good jobs in the field is GIS combined with a solid Computer Science background. ArcInfo/ArcMap/SDE/ArcIMS give you the tools to "do" GIS, but they do require training and good knowledge of fundamental GIS principles. To create systems that combine GIS with day-to-day operations, you need to be able to customize these tools and/or create new applications that utilize these tools, which requires a combination of Computer Science and GIS (or a steep learning curve of on-the-job training).
If your GIS applications are strictly "in-house", you have much wider choices. ESRI has a lot of marketing and inertia behind their products, so you will find many GIS houses with an strong devotion to ESRI as a "standard" and many commercial data sources are going to be oriented toward that "standard".
I've always said that I trust secure web transactions more than I trust giving my credit card to a waiter and having him carry it into the back of the store for five minutes.
When I was in Paris last month, I was, at the time, pleasantly surprised that every cafe or restaurant I went to had wireless credit/debit card readers that they carried to your table so that the card never left your sight. These may be in use more in the U.S., but I don't think I've seen them.
Do these European devices have decent security, or would I have been better off giving Pierre the card to use on a wired reader?
My friends and I were addicted to M.U.L.E. for quite a while. To me, what it had going for it was:
I'm sure I'm looking back at it through rose colored glasses, but if it has network multiplayer, I may lose my job :-)
That's along the lines of what I was thinking -- if you don't want to rip down signs and you don't want to put up signs of your own, just have a self-inking rubber stamp made that says: "This piece of ugly litter brought to you by Herbalife" and stamp every sign you see.
Sorry to reply to myself, but something else occurred to me. The other central paradox is that I could invent a time machine and send it back in time to myself along with instructions on how to invent it. Therefore, if time travel is possible, a time machine could (and would) invent itself.
I personally subscribe to the theory that time travel causes different, splintering time lines to form. This negates the proof that time travel is impossible, since we haven't be visited by time travellers from the future. Instead, we all live in the time line that hasn't been visited, although there are many, many other "we"s that have live in timelines where we have been visited. Its a variation on the anthropic principle.
BTW, my favorite time travel story was in one of the Stainless Steel Rat books. Slippery Jim and Co. are trapped in an inescapable cliffhanger. Suddenly, he gets an idea and at that instant, a time machine appears before him and they jump in and travel forward to the future to the lab of a friend of his who invented a time machine, then they step out and send the machine back to rescue themselves. That, in itself, is the type of paradox which makes time travel extremely unlikely, if not physically impossible.
Or better yet, read all of Paradise Lost. The best thing I can say about His Dark Materials was that it led me to read Paradise Lost. Milton did it much better than Pullman. As others have mentioned, the first book is great, but the series collapses under its own illogic.
If any of the religious zealots who burn Harry Potter sat down and read His Dark Materials, they would probably want to burn Pullman at the stake.
I don't know about that. As other posters have pointed out, you can get fired at a bookstore for taking home coverless books.
When I worked as a stock clerk at the now defunct TG&Y stores, we had to destroy paperbacks. Our boss would watch us take off the covers and throw them in the dumpster. One of the assistant managers would let us de-cover the ones we want them and stack them beside the dumpster (particularly if there was one he wanted) and we could swing around after the store closed and pick them up, but we were warned that officially we could be fired and the store sued if we were caught...
Of course, the only problem is that you have to have accurate census and location information for every butterfly on the face of the planet in order for the forecast to be accurate.
As I mentioned in a previous comment, I think a nice high resolution picture of a cloudswept blue and green plant around, relatively, nearby star would probably be enough -- I just hate that I probably won't be around to find out what it discovers.
Well, I'm no expert (I'm not even an amateur), but I have heard that an array of optical telescopes (particularly if they could be placed on a solid airless body like the moon) could have the ability to optically resolve planets around other stars.
This would be an expensive undertaking, but it would resolve the issue pretty quickly. I think that positive confirmation of extrasolar Earth-like planets would be an amazing, culture changing phenomena, right up there with actually discovering extraterrestrial life.
PI think my info on optical telescope arrays came from Entering Space by Zubrin.
I found this on Greg Egan's (the SF author and programmer) site: Subluminal Applet
Back in college I worked for a desktop publishing/copy/printing company and one of things we did was prepare resume packages for people, including mail-merged cover letters. We would type and copy the resume with cover letters for something like $30 for 20 copies. We had a guy come in who was graduating from vet school and he wanted to be a Kentucky race horse vet, so he obtained a mailing list of every horse breeder in Kentucky and paid us to type in the list (he didn't have it in electronic format) and generate over 200 resumes with mail merged cover letters then mailed all 200+ of them. It cost him a few hundred dollars and out of 200 mailings, he got like 20 offers and just picked the best one. I think that in my career, I've maybe submitted 20 resumes and got three different jobs from them.
While I agree that Quake/Unreal are just fun, violent, eye-candy, there are some great games in the FPS genre. Half-Life and System Shock 2 both have good puzzles (not just the "find the key to open the door"), suspense, and strategic elements.
The two most fundamental impacts the 'net and the web have had on me and my family is communications and access to information.
The first is a no-brainer, I've never been a letter writer (the postal kind) and with our busy schedules, the chances of catching an old friend who lives in the same city, much less the ones scattered across the country, on the phone is vanishly slim. Via e-mail (I know, I know, it ain't the web, but now it is ubiquitous enough that just about everyone I know has e-mail) I am almost daily contact with a bunch of people I haven't seen in years (and a few I've never met face-to-face).
I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to go back to not having the WWW to access almost any kind of information quickly. Flip by a movie and see an actor, but you can't remember his name? Look up the movie in the TV listings, then hit the IMDB to find out. Want to know what's playing at the theater? You don't have to buy a paper or listen to the theater recording (if you can get through). Need to know an obscure fact? Want to find out how to fix your clothes dryer? Looking for a copy of "The Night Before Christmas" to read to your kids on the night before Christmas? Want to look up and purchase an obscure, out of print book? Want to read a three week old article from a foreign newspaper?
These are everyday uses of the net that people already take for granted. News, sex, and retailing doesn't cover it by a long shot. These are fundamental changes in the way we do things and interact with others...
Ya know, I'm sure this comment will be taken wrong and I will be flamed for saying it, but I think the Pullman books may be a bit too controversial for many young readers. I read them and enjoyed the hell out of them, but I don't think my daughter (who has read the Harry Potter books numerous times) is ready for the theology behind Pullman's books.
I'm not a very religious person (skeptic), but I know a lot of religious people that might severely curtail their children's reading if they have read the Pullman books. I know that literature is a great forum for "dangerous" ideas. The HP phenomena has been a great boost for children's reading around the world, despite an opposition to the occult content of the books. Pullman's portrayal of the Christian God as a dottering old man and Lucifer as an hero/anti-hero was a bit disturbing, particularly for a children's book.
Go ahead and flame me, but I'm saving them for when my kids get older and I'm glad I read them before I gave them to my daughter.