I don't think it was a straw man at all. I have seen people take exactly the stance that I attributed to you as an overreaction to other people saying that spanking is not abuse. There was no intentional misrepresentation--GP said "Spanking is child abuse?" and you replied "Inflicting physical pain is child abuse." That rationally includes all physical pain regardless of intent. It turns out that what you meant is rather different than what you wrote, so thank you for clarifying.
I don't believe backtalk is in line with medical treatment, though I failed to make that explicit. There was another poster who mentioned that he spanked his son only twice, and one or both of those times was when he found his son doing something incredibly dangerous. The example that's stuck in my head is finding a child playing with a gun--and I recognize it's a poor one because responsible parents keep them where kids can't get to them. But in an instance like that, where the child cannot be expected to understand why he can't do this particular thing, it may take more than stern words to stop him from repeating it. And that's probably the approach I would take--first, get the child out of harm's way; second, tell him sternly never to do that again, and why it is dangerous in case he can comprehend it; and third, remain on the lookout and if he's heading towards the danger again, then maybe it's time for a spanking. I believe that for it to be effective it must be used sparingly, and for it to be punishment instead of violence it must not be done in anger.
I do not have children, so this is all hypothetical. I agree that there are problems in reasoning, implementation and severity. That says to me not that the entire practice is barbaric, but that people can misuse and abuse it. The same can be done with many (any?) form of discipline. Do you see a difference between inflicting physical pain versus emotional or psychological pain as punishment? Doesn't most punishment involve some kind of pain, even if it is the pain of having to sit on the couch while your siblings continue to play? That sounds trivial to an adult, but it is far from it for a child.
I had a good conversation with someone here a year or so ago where we discussed this pretty thoroughly, and I came away with more respect for his point of view than I had before. My own reaction against those who choose to never spank their kids is that that often means they do not discipline their kids at all--you can see examples of this all over in public: kids being given whatever they want in order to keep them from causing a scene--t's like the kids hold all the power and the parents none. So my perspective was almost the complete opposite of his and I suspect yours. Discussing the subject in-depth helped me to see more ways in which alternatives to corporal punishment can be applied, and I think my conversational partner left feeling like maybe it isn't the great evil he thought it was coming in. I probably would have responded to your post even with the "as punishment" qualification, because I think that's still overly broad and I am genuinely curious about the aspect of emotional and psychological pain. The tone of my response would have been more like this post than my previous one, though.
Don't put disinfectant on that scrape on your kid's knee, because it stings. Don't take him in for surgery because there will be post-op pain--after all, the doctor abused him by cutting him open. How is this still legal, in this day and age?!
The examples above are cases in which the end justifies the means. I think that there are better ways to discipline most children than spanking, but equating a spanking given by a clearly responsible and loving parent with slapping a kid because he blocked your view of the television is incredibly simplistic. There is an argument to be had about whether or not spanking can be categorized with my examples above, and it's one I'm interested in, but your position is untenable.
Thank you for your thoughtful and informative response. This is why I come here.
I like your use of the word "experience" over "environment". That brings some overtones of pragmatism to the forefront of my mind, and as an admirer of William James that is a good thing, and fits very nicely with some of his writings about truth-making. While I am aware that "environment" includes relationships, often explicitly as in child-rearing, "experience" is as you say a richer and more demonstrative term. It's giving me some hints of connections to other things I've been thinking about.
Motivation is tricky. I know in my own case over-socialization doesn't play a role--I have always thought for myself, but it tends to stop at the thinking. I rarely attempt to do things that I know I will not excel at, and I frequently find that in things I am interested in but not yet adept at, my interest can flag fairly quickly--the thought pattern is, what's the point in doing it if it is already being done better? My hypothesis is that throughout grade school I was rarely challenged, and the times that I was were never in areas I found interesting to begin with. If my interest in something is strong enough, though, I will practice or learn what I need to in order to be able to pursue it. And I think reading (most of) this book has helped me realize that there is no substitute for simply doing more of what I want to be good at (music and songwriting in my case), and doing it in ways that are challenging, always setting the bar a little higher than I can reach. It won't help me establish a regular exercise routine, but there's very little in this world that will!
I read the abstract in your last link, or more accurately my eyes scanned the page. You wrote that the changes in the brain due to an unstable genome "can't be passed on, so it's not really the same thing." I'm not sure what thing you are referring to, and what differentiates that effect from other gene activations caused by diet or exercise or what have you--unless I missed something in my reading, the "on/off" state of a particular gene is not (or not necessarily) passed on. Or is the difference that the gene is likely to be passed on and therefore have the potential to be activated, whereas the unstable genome is not an activation but a mutation?
Whoa, hang on there. That seems awfully fine-printy to me, especially given the fact that everyone pushing CFLs, from government to the industry to the Home Despot, simply says, "Oh yeah, just stick it wherever you'd stick an incandescent and it'll last longer and use less energy!" There's a reasonable expectation that that is the case, and if it's not...it's sneaky.
I already posted about this above so I'll be brief, but with you being a real live biologist and all, I was curious to know if you have ever come across David Shenk's The Genius In All Of Us, and if so what you think of it. There appears to be some correlation between the argument put forth in that book and what you wrote above, though from the book's perspective the question of which has a greater impact is not as meaningful, since it is the interaction between genes and environment that gives the outcome.
Seeing this story has inspired me to finally finish reading the thing...which will be good news to the person who lent it to me half a year ago!
It's actually a lot more complicated than Intelligence = Genes + Environment. According to the book The Genius In All Of Us, there is a large group of people spanning the fields of genetics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology among others that hypothesizes (with plenty of evidence) that the equation looks more like Intelligence = Genes * Environment. That is, genes certainly play a role, but genes are being activated and de-activated all the time. Things like daily exercise not only get you habituated to fitness-helping routines, they can actually chemically act on cell DNA to turn on genes that...well I don't remember precisely what they do but it's something to do with adding more muscle mass or what have you. The point is that the interaction between genes and environment is more complex than previously thought, and it's looking like what common sense has said for years: certain people will thrive in certain kinds of environments that would stifle or prove useless to others. It cannot be simplified to "Person A has better genes and will always do better in this area than person B," nor can it be reduced to "Person A had a more nurturing environment than Person B and so does better in this area."
The book I mentioned is divided into two sections: the argument and the evidence, so for those of you who like substance with your sensationalism, it's nicely laid out (and is nearly half the volume of the total text).
And what could have happened here was a discussion of the laws involved, which are the OS of society, and their application. It hasn't turned out this way so far, and there is a sizable subset of Slashdotters that don't like politics, but whatever. It's kind of like Idle...if you don't like it, don't open the discussion. Me, I come here specifically for the comments, and for all its flaws Slashdot still has in my opinion the best system I've encountered so far, so I welcome any topic of even mild interest.
Slightly OT, but another fun use for these fluids is to fill a shallow container with one and place it above an upward-facing speaker. Hook up a tone generator and you can watch the fluid form increasingly intricate patterns as the frequency of the tone is increased.
In other places, there are underground water flows that degrade the roads. That happens frequently around my area of Pennsylvania. This may also be fixed by laying a deeper foundation; I don't know. Given PennDOT's penchant for half-assing things I wouldn't be surprised if there is an easy fix.
(What's big and yellow and sleeps seven? A PennDOT truck.)
I heard an interview with the creator of the Stand Your Ground law the other day on NPR's Talk of the Nation, and he said this is clearly a case where Stand Your Ground does not apply.
That law, according to him, was created in order to give some further protections to people who find themselves being assaulted and have to make the split-second decision to try to flee or to respond with force. What happened before was that, outside of your home, if you were being assaulted and you met force with force, you essentially had to prove that there was no way you could have escaped or you could face criminal charges. Stand Your Ground says that in a case where you are being assaulted, you have the right to meet force with force.
The law doesn't apply here because Zimmerman at some point approached Martin when he could have stayed in his vehicle as he was told (and trained, as he was part of a Neighborhood Watch). His guilt or innocence is a matter for the courts to decide, but that requires that he be charged first. The calls to strike down the law due to this case are unwarranted.
How quickly? More quickly than a computer-controlled mirror could be rotated to reflect the laser back at its source? If a surface could reflect 60% of the energy and angle it back at the source, I could see that causing problems. But I'm just typing as I think, and I doubt the potential benefit of protection against laser weapons outweighs the costs (monetary and strategic) of outfitting a ship with such a system.
If you're doctor says there is a good chance you'll get a hart attack if you continue with your current diet, do you ignore it because you need more proof?
No, I ignore it because I need more venison! I'm sure I could win against a deer.
His guiding principle is that "creators need an immediate connection to what they create." He gives four examples as they can apply to programming: scene rendering, game mechanics, coding abstract concepts (implementing binary search in the example), and animation. In my opinion all four of them are noteworthy.
The biggest difference between this and REPL is indeed that it's graphical. But, at least the way he has implemented it, that is not a trivial difference! In the three naturally graphical examples, the coupling between the code and the rendered image is very dynamic and explicit. In every case save for animation, there are two windows living side-by-side: the canvas or a data view, and code. In the scene rendering example, he has a functionally-generated tree with sky and mountains behind it, and when he changes the var controlling the tree's height, the tree instantly changes to reflect it. He's also added number sliders--by alt-clicking a number in the code window, you can slide your mouse left or right and immediately see the effect it has on the scene. Kinda boring with the tree height slider, but there are other more interesting variables available to play with. In addition, you can alt-click the image, which highlights the pixel you're over and any other pixels that are drawn by the same function, and also takes you to that function in the code itself.
The game mechanics example is the one I found to be the most compelling. Game design takes a lot of trial and error to get things feeling right, and that's where those number sliders start to look very tasty indeed. On top of that, he's essentially turned Braid's main mechanic into a development tool--play the game a bit, then you can replay the controller input and see the effects any code changes you make have on what happens. Or, display a ghosted path of the entire recorded segment--so you can see how the entire jumping arc is affected when you slide the impulse var value around. The emphasis in these first two examples is on play, and how being able to play around with things and get instant feedback on them can lead to new things you wouldn't have thought of doing otherwise.
The abstract stuff is closest to REPL, since there is no canvas component. But the immediacy is still compelling and looks to me how a debugger ought to act. It's as if the "watch" window in a traditional debugger showed you not only what a var's current value is, but what it was before and what it will be after the next assignment five lines down from here. In the binary search implementation, he writes the line "pivot = (min + max) / 2" and, given the concrete data he'd already defined in the data window, immediately sees "pivot = 2.5". That's obviously not a valid array index, and it was caught and corrected immediately, with no need to compile and run and see unexpected results and stare at the code, and turn on the debugger... When he implements a loop, the state of each variable during each iteration of loop are shown with a new column added for each run through the loop. And if he changes the searched-for array item in the data window, all values are instantly updated.
The advantages become clear when you see it in action. You don't have to write a bunch of test functions to call your code with various inputs, then compile and step through the results, or litter your code with debug and print statements to see what's going on. It's all clearly laid out before you, making it easier to see if it's actually doing what you intended and expected it to do. Of course writing those tests later on is still a good idea, especially for a large project, but this way of working never pulls your focus away from your primary objective: working on whatever functionality you're working on.
After watching the video I looked on his website to see if he's made any of these tools available, and it doesn't look like it. I am very impressed, though, and I hope he releases them or someone else picks up on the idea.
This is much less of an executive summary than I anticipated. I'm long-winded. Sorry.
Peace was one of the ones I listed in another comment as being too difficult for me to get much enjoyment out of, the other being There Are Doors. Can you tell me what about Peace so struck your fancy? I can't help but feel as though I'm missing the key to unlock this one because it is so well-regarded. I own it and mean to re-read it at some point, so perhaps being more aware of...whatever it is that I'm not...will help me better enjoy it.
It's hard to say. There's a difference between a puzzle that is too hard for everyone, which would suck, and a puzzle that I couldn't solve, which would be frustrating to me but not necessarily reflect poorly on the puzzle. When I'm the frustrated one it's hard to tell the difference. The books There Are Doors and Peace fall into this category. An Evil Guest, on the other hand, was just not a very good book.
I agree--The Fifth Head of Cerberus is his other standout work. That one is a little esoteric though and not one I'd recommend as an introduction to Wolfe unless the reader is previously known to enjoy strangely constructed stories (House of Leaves comes to mind, though Cerberus is a lot shorter and a bit trickier in my opinion.)
I'm glad you were so quick to post--being at the top of the thread guarantees lots of eyes will see Wolfe's name. Now, if only a few someones familiar with him were to come by with some mod points...
I'll second Gene Wolfe and expand the selection to include all three series: Book of the New Sun, Book of the Long Sun, and Book of the Short Sun. His writing is of a strange and rare quality, and while I don't always like it (some of his other novels and short stories leave me wondering what the hell happened and why I should care) it is always interesting. The Book of the New Sun in particular was reportedly highly acclaimed when it came out, but that faded quickly and in my opinion unjustly. I only discovered it through a friend's recommendation eight or nine years ago and it has swiftly risen to the top of my list. It is one of those rare books that really rewards conscious and repeated readings, as Wolfe leaves things unspoken for careful readers to puzzle out on their own. Even on a purely surface level it's an enjoyable read.
Cold reading is a skill that takes a lot of practice to get right; it shouldn't be surprising that a lot of information is missed by those who haven't quite got the hang of it yet.
But WoW's servers are exactly what the industry wants to move towards--you pay a subscription to access the content, and when you stop paying you stop playing. Distribution is still very controlled, except now it's not even something that you pay for and get--it's something you have to keep paying for and you lose it when you stop.
I responded to another post above regarding concerts, so I'll only restate that not all music can be played or even belongs in a live setting.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it was a straw man at all. I have seen people take exactly the stance that I attributed to you as an overreaction to other people saying that spanking is not abuse. There was no intentional misrepresentation--GP said "Spanking is child abuse?" and you replied "Inflicting physical pain is child abuse." That rationally includes all physical pain regardless of intent. It turns out that what you meant is rather different than what you wrote, so thank you for clarifying.
I don't believe backtalk is in line with medical treatment, though I failed to make that explicit. There was another poster who mentioned that he spanked his son only twice, and one or both of those times was when he found his son doing something incredibly dangerous. The example that's stuck in my head is finding a child playing with a gun--and I recognize it's a poor one because responsible parents keep them where kids can't get to them. But in an instance like that, where the child cannot be expected to understand why he can't do this particular thing, it may take more than stern words to stop him from repeating it. And that's probably the approach I would take--first, get the child out of harm's way; second, tell him sternly never to do that again, and why it is dangerous in case he can comprehend it; and third, remain on the lookout and if he's heading towards the danger again, then maybe it's time for a spanking. I believe that for it to be effective it must be used sparingly, and for it to be punishment instead of violence it must not be done in anger.
I do not have children, so this is all hypothetical. I agree that there are problems in reasoning, implementation and severity. That says to me not that the entire practice is barbaric, but that people can misuse and abuse it. The same can be done with many (any?) form of discipline. Do you see a difference between inflicting physical pain versus emotional or psychological pain as punishment? Doesn't most punishment involve some kind of pain, even if it is the pain of having to sit on the couch while your siblings continue to play? That sounds trivial to an adult, but it is far from it for a child.
I had a good conversation with someone here a year or so ago where we discussed this pretty thoroughly, and I came away with more respect for his point of view than I had before. My own reaction against those who choose to never spank their kids is that that often means they do not discipline their kids at all--you can see examples of this all over in public: kids being given whatever they want in order to keep them from causing a scene--t's like the kids hold all the power and the parents none. So my perspective was almost the complete opposite of his and I suspect yours. Discussing the subject in-depth helped me to see more ways in which alternatives to corporal punishment can be applied, and I think my conversational partner left feeling like maybe it isn't the great evil he thought it was coming in. I probably would have responded to your post even with the "as punishment" qualification, because I think that's still overly broad and I am genuinely curious about the aspect of emotional and psychological pain. The tone of my response would have been more like this post than my previous one, though.
Indeed.
Don't put disinfectant on that scrape on your kid's knee, because it stings.
Don't take him in for surgery because there will be post-op pain--after all, the doctor abused him by cutting him open. How is this still legal, in this day and age?!
The examples above are cases in which the end justifies the means. I think that there are better ways to discipline most children than spanking, but equating a spanking given by a clearly responsible and loving parent with slapping a kid because he blocked your view of the television is incredibly simplistic. There is an argument to be had about whether or not spanking can be categorized with my examples above, and it's one I'm interested in, but your position is untenable.
Thank you for your thoughtful and informative response. This is why I come here.
I like your use of the word "experience" over "environment". That brings some overtones of pragmatism to the forefront of my mind, and as an admirer of William James that is a good thing, and fits very nicely with some of his writings about truth-making. While I am aware that "environment" includes relationships, often explicitly as in child-rearing, "experience" is as you say a richer and more demonstrative term. It's giving me some hints of connections to other things I've been thinking about.
Motivation is tricky. I know in my own case over-socialization doesn't play a role--I have always thought for myself, but it tends to stop at the thinking. I rarely attempt to do things that I know I will not excel at, and I frequently find that in things I am interested in but not yet adept at, my interest can flag fairly quickly--the thought pattern is, what's the point in doing it if it is already being done better? My hypothesis is that throughout grade school I was rarely challenged, and the times that I was were never in areas I found interesting to begin with. If my interest in something is strong enough, though, I will practice or learn what I need to in order to be able to pursue it. And I think reading (most of) this book has helped me realize that there is no substitute for simply doing more of what I want to be good at (music and songwriting in my case), and doing it in ways that are challenging, always setting the bar a little higher than I can reach. It won't help me establish a regular exercise routine, but there's very little in this world that will!
I read the abstract in your last link, or more accurately my eyes scanned the page. You wrote that the changes in the brain due to an unstable genome "can't be passed on, so it's not really the same thing." I'm not sure what thing you are referring to, and what differentiates that effect from other gene activations caused by diet or exercise or what have you--unless I missed something in my reading, the "on/off" state of a particular gene is not (or not necessarily) passed on. Or is the difference that the gene is likely to be passed on and therefore have the potential to be activated, whereas the unstable genome is not an activation but a mutation?
Every package I've read for a CFL--
Whoa, hang on there. That seems awfully fine-printy to me, especially given the fact that everyone pushing CFLs, from government to the industry to the Home Despot, simply says, "Oh yeah, just stick it wherever you'd stick an incandescent and it'll last longer and use less energy!" There's a reasonable expectation that that is the case, and if it's not...it's sneaky.
Kudos for reading the instructions, though!
I already posted about this above so I'll be brief, but with you being a real live biologist and all, I was curious to know if you have ever come across David Shenk's The Genius In All Of Us, and if so what you think of it. There appears to be some correlation between the argument put forth in that book and what you wrote above, though from the book's perspective the question of which has a greater impact is not as meaningful, since it is the interaction between genes and environment that gives the outcome.
Seeing this story has inspired me to finally finish reading the thing...which will be good news to the person who lent it to me half a year ago!
It's actually a lot more complicated than Intelligence = Genes + Environment. According to the book The Genius In All Of Us, there is a large group of people spanning the fields of genetics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology among others that hypothesizes (with plenty of evidence) that the equation looks more like Intelligence = Genes * Environment. That is, genes certainly play a role, but genes are being activated and de-activated all the time. Things like daily exercise not only get you habituated to fitness-helping routines, they can actually chemically act on cell DNA to turn on genes that...well I don't remember precisely what they do but it's something to do with adding more muscle mass or what have you. The point is that the interaction between genes and environment is more complex than previously thought, and it's looking like what common sense has said for years: certain people will thrive in certain kinds of environments that would stifle or prove useless to others. It cannot be simplified to "Person A has better genes and will always do better in this area than person B," nor can it be reduced to "Person A had a more nurturing environment than Person B and so does better in this area."
The book I mentioned is divided into two sections: the argument and the evidence, so for those of you who like substance with your sensationalism, it's nicely laid out (and is nearly half the volume of the total text).
PURE nerds don't have daughters. QED.
And what could have happened here was a discussion of the laws involved, which are the OS of society, and their application. It hasn't turned out this way so far, and there is a sizable subset of Slashdotters that don't like politics, but whatever. It's kind of like Idle...if you don't like it, don't open the discussion. Me, I come here specifically for the comments, and for all its flaws Slashdot still has in my opinion the best system I've encountered so far, so I welcome any topic of even mild interest.
Slightly OT, but another fun use for these fluids is to fill a shallow container with one and place it above an upward-facing speaker. Hook up a tone generator and you can watch the fluid form increasingly intricate patterns as the frequency of the tone is increased.
Stoners, take note!
In other places, there are underground water flows that degrade the roads. That happens frequently around my area of Pennsylvania. This may also be fixed by laying a deeper foundation; I don't know. Given PennDOT's penchant for half-assing things I wouldn't be surprised if there is an easy fix.
(What's big and yellow and sleeps seven? A PennDOT truck.)
Trying to be funny is still hazardous to your karma. Succeeding at being funny is now rewarded, is all.
I heard an interview with the creator of the Stand Your Ground law the other day on NPR's Talk of the Nation, and he said this is clearly a case where Stand Your Ground does not apply.
That law, according to him, was created in order to give some further protections to people who find themselves being assaulted and have to make the split-second decision to try to flee or to respond with force. What happened before was that, outside of your home, if you were being assaulted and you met force with force, you essentially had to prove that there was no way you could have escaped or you could face criminal charges. Stand Your Ground says that in a case where you are being assaulted, you have the right to meet force with force.
The law doesn't apply here because Zimmerman at some point approached Martin when he could have stayed in his vehicle as he was told (and trained, as he was part of a Neighborhood Watch). His guilt or innocence is a matter for the courts to decide, but that requires that he be charged first. The calls to strike down the law due to this case are unwarranted.
How quickly? More quickly than a computer-controlled mirror could be rotated to reflect the laser back at its source? If a surface could reflect 60% of the energy and angle it back at the source, I could see that causing problems. But I'm just typing as I think, and I doubt the potential benefit of protection against laser weapons outweighs the costs (monetary and strategic) of outfitting a ship with such a system.
If you're doctor says there is a good chance you'll get a hart attack if you continue with your current diet, do you ignore it because you need more proof?
No, I ignore it because I need more venison! I'm sure I could win against a deer.
"May result in increased desire for gambling or sexual activity."
I almost swore it was a joke the first time I saw the commercial, especially given that it was to treat restless leg syndrome.
Everything you have ever written works perfectly, the first time? Damn, I must be doing it wrong. Like every other programmer I've ever met.
His guiding principle is that "creators need an immediate connection to what they create." He gives four examples as they can apply to programming: scene rendering, game mechanics, coding abstract concepts (implementing binary search in the example), and animation. In my opinion all four of them are noteworthy.
The biggest difference between this and REPL is indeed that it's graphical. But, at least the way he has implemented it, that is not a trivial difference! In the three naturally graphical examples, the coupling between the code and the rendered image is very dynamic and explicit. In every case save for animation, there are two windows living side-by-side: the canvas or a data view, and code. In the scene rendering example, he has a functionally-generated tree with sky and mountains behind it, and when he changes the var controlling the tree's height, the tree instantly changes to reflect it. He's also added number sliders--by alt-clicking a number in the code window, you can slide your mouse left or right and immediately see the effect it has on the scene. Kinda boring with the tree height slider, but there are other more interesting variables available to play with. In addition, you can alt-click the image, which highlights the pixel you're over and any other pixels that are drawn by the same function, and also takes you to that function in the code itself.
The game mechanics example is the one I found to be the most compelling. Game design takes a lot of trial and error to get things feeling right, and that's where those number sliders start to look very tasty indeed. On top of that, he's essentially turned Braid's main mechanic into a development tool--play the game a bit, then you can replay the controller input and see the effects any code changes you make have on what happens. Or, display a ghosted path of the entire recorded segment--so you can see how the entire jumping arc is affected when you slide the impulse var value around. The emphasis in these first two examples is on play, and how being able to play around with things and get instant feedback on them can lead to new things you wouldn't have thought of doing otherwise.
The abstract stuff is closest to REPL, since there is no canvas component. But the immediacy is still compelling and looks to me how a debugger ought to act. It's as if the "watch" window in a traditional debugger showed you not only what a var's current value is, but what it was before and what it will be after the next assignment five lines down from here. In the binary search implementation, he writes the line "pivot = (min + max) / 2" and, given the concrete data he'd already defined in the data window, immediately sees "pivot = 2.5". That's obviously not a valid array index, and it was caught and corrected immediately, with no need to compile and run and see unexpected results and stare at the code, and turn on the debugger... When he implements a loop, the state of each variable during each iteration of loop are shown with a new column added for each run through the loop. And if he changes the searched-for array item in the data window, all values are instantly updated.
The advantages become clear when you see it in action. You don't have to write a bunch of test functions to call your code with various inputs, then compile and step through the results, or litter your code with debug and print statements to see what's going on. It's all clearly laid out before you, making it easier to see if it's actually doing what you intended and expected it to do. Of course writing those tests later on is still a good idea, especially for a large project, but this way of working never pulls your focus away from your primary objective: working on whatever functionality you're working on.
After watching the video I looked on his website to see if he's made any of these tools available, and it doesn't look like it. I am very impressed, though, and I hope he releases them or someone else picks up on the idea.
This is much less of an executive summary than I anticipated. I'm long-winded. Sorry.
Despite what you may have been told, we don't know everything. It's a small but important distinction.
Peace was one of the ones I listed in another comment as being too difficult for me to get much enjoyment out of, the other being There Are Doors. Can you tell me what about Peace so struck your fancy? I can't help but feel as though I'm missing the key to unlock this one because it is so well-regarded. I own it and mean to re-read it at some point, so perhaps being more aware of...whatever it is that I'm not...will help me better enjoy it.
It's hard to say. There's a difference between a puzzle that is too hard for everyone, which would suck, and a puzzle that I couldn't solve, which would be frustrating to me but not necessarily reflect poorly on the puzzle. When I'm the frustrated one it's hard to tell the difference. The books There Are Doors and Peace fall into this category. An Evil Guest, on the other hand, was just not a very good book.
I agree--The Fifth Head of Cerberus is his other standout work. That one is a little esoteric though and not one I'd recommend as an introduction to Wolfe unless the reader is previously known to enjoy strangely constructed stories (House of Leaves comes to mind, though Cerberus is a lot shorter and a bit trickier in my opinion.)
I'm glad you were so quick to post--being at the top of the thread guarantees lots of eyes will see Wolfe's name. Now, if only a few someones familiar with him were to come by with some mod points...
I'll second Gene Wolfe and expand the selection to include all three series: Book of the New Sun, Book of the Long Sun, and Book of the Short Sun. His writing is of a strange and rare quality, and while I don't always like it (some of his other novels and short stories leave me wondering what the hell happened and why I should care) it is always interesting. The Book of the New Sun in particular was reportedly highly acclaimed when it came out, but that faded quickly and in my opinion unjustly. I only discovered it through a friend's recommendation eight or nine years ago and it has swiftly risen to the top of my list. It is one of those rare books that really rewards conscious and repeated readings, as Wolfe leaves things unspoken for careful readers to puzzle out on their own. Even on a purely surface level it's an enjoyable read.
That is interesting. For me to understand what you mean, could you please name some actions which have no consequences? I can't think of any.
Arguing on the Internet and voting both come to mind.
Cold reading is a skill that takes a lot of practice to get right; it shouldn't be surprising that a lot of information is missed by those who haven't quite got the hang of it yet.
But WoW's servers are exactly what the industry wants to move towards--you pay a subscription to access the content, and when you stop paying you stop playing. Distribution is still very controlled, except now it's not even something that you pay for and get--it's something you have to keep paying for and you lose it when you stop.
I responded to another post above regarding concerts, so I'll only restate that not all music can be played or even belongs in a live setting.