It's been awhile since I read it, but the later books in general show clear signs of TP's losing battle with Alzheimer's. The welds are too easy to spot, and continuity suffers. The Postal books especially seem to have been edited by third parties, rather than written. There are some glaringly inconsistent passages which do not even make logical sense, once willingness to suspend disbelief cools down a bit. It's sad, because the early and middle works are solid, well-crafted and literate, even profound in Small Gods. Pratchett's stuff will the next Silas Marner for generations of English speaking school kids, once sanity prevails in the (U.S.) public schools.
Intelligence is not a goal, and can't really be "inhibited" in some teleological sense. The real lesson of ecology and evolution is not that human beings are wonderfully special because of our big brains, but that our ecosystem contains such vast synergies that it can support serpents, slime molds and syllogisms simultaneously. It is the relationships among and between the various nodes on the Net of Indra that are so interesting, not the remarkably passive and unimaginative human brains that fail to grasp their significance.
On the other hand, given human "intelligence" (whatever that is), there's not much pressure to push the envelope except that which we put on ourselves. Olivia Newton-John will benefit from cancer research, but remember that along the way she shunned nerds and selected John Travolta. An unintelligent, typically primate choice.
Those of you who don't remember Ernie Kovacs may remember the wife locked with Cid Caesar in the hardware store basement in Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Now that's a gorgeous overexposed minor actress with family connections (Adams' "family" after Kovacs died was every comedian on Planet Earth).
Disposable income becomes locked in ice as more overconfident straw dogs flood Discovery channel with tax deductible vacation footage of themselves turning blue on trails blazed with discarded oxygen cylinders, dropping themselves off the Yeti haunted trails into the increasingly commonplace blizzard of high altitude footnotes, Sherpas laughing all the way to their own romantic banks. Heaven is implacable. Heaven does not care.
Crap, there goes all my mods! Please note, Obama doesn't have the line item veto any more than Bush had the line item veto. All Bush had were extra-constitutional (i.e., illegal) executive addenda.
Logic and proportion fell sloppy dead decades ago, but I have to admit I recognized myself in Wayne Knight's portrayal of Dennis Nedry, from Jurassic Park. He was my White Knight, with brains sufficient to engulf six million lines of code and a startlingly arrogant take on who gives a damn about conspiracies no one knows about yet. Is that the frantic largesnack coderboy Stroustrup is aiming his adhesive spit at? Life large in memory, Dennis, Iron Byron of Defective Codebase!
Except for ripping off Smokey the Bear for commerce, or putting President-elects on pirate mintage, of course. What you're missing is the fun part of tacky and tasteless, viz., sucking pennies out of the braindead.
By predicting, I presume you mean predicating? As in, "it's turtles all the way down"? Fallacy is fascinating. Why is it possible to conceive of biting your own forehead, for example? Goedel already proved that axiomatic systems contain errors, especially the error of excluding inconceivable axioms, from which we can conclude that "scientific method" is a) provisional, and b) political.
Most tail lights look like anime cats (or Bender's girlfriend) to me, which makes some sense because they're designed to capture attention and convey information that may be vitally important. Since car designers are interesting people, one presumes they do such things on purpose.
Goedel's Theorem informs me (kind of the same way that General Relativity informs me that "everything is relative," granted, but still...:) that nothing based on axioms can describe everything that can be described, or to put it another way, the universe and all its wonders can't be reduced to a point that is not also singular. But Goedel was making his point about the limits of mathematics, not physics - about the nature of logical systems and why Bertrand Russel wasted his adult life on a fool's errand. So. Given that quantum mechanics has actual demonstrable byproducts in daily experience, starting with the transistor, what does this weirdness about "links to mathematics" add to the mundane rub and jostle of physics? Could it be that all strictly logical systems are simply tautologies?
Relax, though! Killer bees are the only thing tough enough to save a $60 billion per annum migratory bee pollination industry. Honeybees pollinate California's almond crop, for example. Along with apples, pears, peaches, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, soybeans, alfalfa, pumpkins, etc. etc. As for what killed off all the honeybees, at least in northerly latitudes, think agrichemicals and monoculture lawns.
Oak trees are wind pollinated, no bees directly involved. Honeybees do gather spring pollens from wind-pollinated tree species, however, simply as a high-calorie food source when nectar flows are scant.
I understand reading pdf's on a computer. The concept of ebook, however, seems very recherche to me. Why in the world would buy a reader just to peruse a freely available OUT OF PRINT pdf, ps, or textfile? Or are you talking about something academic and utterly recondite, like Rolf Singer's Agaricales, which retailed at $169, brand new, in 1972 or so and hasn't been seen since, not even gathering dust, except on my bookshelf? I doubt you could pay anyone to scan that one, let along prooofread it, in rny hurnble op1nicri.
There is, of course, a difference between out of print and public domain. Public domain is fair game, provided anything value-added (like correct spelling, modern punctuation, etc.) is your own work if you re-copyright it. I'm not a lawyer, of course, or I'd have drowned myself long ago.
Honeypots are gnu... er, new? I recall encountering a honeypot site shortly after Gulf War One, "Endearing Sandstorm," or whatever that was. It had photos of the first predator reconnaissance flyer, but nothing to indicate scale except plastic bonding details. It sucked you in to a mysterious set of graphics which seemed to suggest that GPS was "fuzzy" for everyone but the military. I didn't linger. The ratio of effort to detail was set way too high, for something so obviously exposed.
It's amazing how many authors/writers/novelists/biographers about Chaucer's age take notes and squirrel them away. Dunno if there's any sort of indexing system for handwritten stuff, though - does anyone have time to index their own notes, except of course in Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds?
Unfortunately, my experience mirrors yours. I did a couple of years of near-genius work when I was younger. Some of my own code reads like the Book of Revelations to me now. I can barely understand it, and I was never a slacker about inline comments. Apparently, I never knew what a good comment was, or what I'd done that was so noteworthy, because some of those remarks seem downright cryptic to me. I was no Steve Wozniak, ever, but I could write beautiful code once. That mind is a complete stranger to me now, at age 64.
I use FireFox and SQLite Manager to keep a searchable list of memoranda to myself, these days. It helps, it really does. I keep telling myself that.
Slashdot Mirror
No need to apologize. I was an English major back in the day.
It's been awhile since I read it, but the later books in general show clear signs of TP's losing battle with Alzheimer's. The welds are too easy to spot, and continuity suffers. The Postal books especially seem to have been edited by third parties, rather than written. There are some glaringly inconsistent passages which do not even make logical sense, once willingness to suspend disbelief cools down a bit. It's sad, because the early and middle works are solid, well-crafted and literate, even profound in Small Gods. Pratchett's stuff will the next Silas Marner for generations of English speaking school kids, once sanity prevails in the (U.S.) public schools.
Not for a cut-and-paste potboiler like Thud it doesn't. Granny Weatherwax, maybe.
Intelligence is not a goal, and can't really be "inhibited" in some teleological sense. The real lesson of ecology and evolution is not that human beings are wonderfully special because of our big brains, but that our ecosystem contains such vast synergies that it can support serpents, slime molds and syllogisms simultaneously. It is the relationships among and between the various nodes on the Net of Indra that are so interesting, not the remarkably passive and unimaginative human brains that fail to grasp their significance.
On the other hand, given human "intelligence" (whatever that is), there's not much pressure to push the envelope except that which we put on ourselves. Olivia Newton-John will benefit from cancer research, but remember that along the way she shunned nerds and selected John Travolta. An unintelligent, typically primate choice.
Live by the sword, die by declining revenues.
So what's it about?
Those of you who don't remember Ernie Kovacs may remember the wife locked with Cid Caesar in the hardware store basement in Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Now that's a gorgeous overexposed minor actress with family connections (Adams' "family" after Kovacs died was every comedian on Planet Earth).
Disposable income becomes locked in ice as more overconfident straw dogs flood Discovery channel with tax deductible vacation footage of themselves turning blue on trails blazed with discarded oxygen cylinders, dropping themselves off the Yeti haunted trails into the increasingly commonplace blizzard of high altitude footnotes, Sherpas laughing all the way to their own romantic banks. Heaven is implacable. Heaven does not care.
001110110010110100101001
Simple. Massive redundant storage under Cheyenne Mountain, plus blue-green lasers and a simple COBOL program which writes 1's and 0's onto the Moon.
Crap, there goes all my mods! Please note, Obama doesn't have the line item veto any more than Bush had the line item veto. All Bush had were extra-constitutional (i.e., illegal) executive addenda.
Logic and proportion fell sloppy dead decades ago, but I have to admit I recognized myself in Wayne Knight's portrayal of Dennis Nedry, from Jurassic Park. He was my White Knight, with brains sufficient to engulf six million lines of code and a startlingly arrogant take on who gives a damn about conspiracies no one knows about yet. Is that the frantic largesnack coderboy Stroustrup is aiming his adhesive spit at? Life large in memory, Dennis, Iron Byron of Defective Codebase!
Oh, Moore's Law. Never mind :-)
Kurt Gödel, of course. There is no "Godel" unless he can yödel.
Except for ripping off Smokey the Bear for commerce, or putting President-elects on pirate mintage, of course. What you're missing is the fun part of tacky and tasteless, viz., sucking pennies out of the braindead.
By predicting, I presume you mean predicating? As in, "it's turtles all the way down"? Fallacy is fascinating. Why is it possible to conceive of biting your own forehead, for example? Goedel already proved that axiomatic systems contain errors, especially the error of excluding inconceivable axioms, from which we can conclude that "scientific method" is a) provisional, and b) political.
Most tail lights look like anime cats (or Bender's girlfriend) to me, which makes some sense because they're designed to capture attention and convey information that may be vitally important. Since car designers are interesting people, one presumes they do such things on purpose.
Goedel's Theorem informs me (kind of the same way that General Relativity informs me that "everything is relative," granted, but still... :) that nothing based on axioms can describe everything that can be described, or to put it another way, the universe and all its wonders can't be reduced to a point that is not also singular. But Goedel was making his point about the limits of mathematics, not physics - about the nature of logical systems and why Bertrand Russel wasted his adult life on a fool's errand. So. Given that quantum mechanics has actual demonstrable byproducts in daily experience, starting with the transistor, what does this weirdness about "links to mathematics" add to the mundane rub and jostle of physics? Could it be that all strictly logical systems are simply tautologies?
http://www.ars.usda.gov/Research/docs.htm?docid=11059&page=6
Relax, though! Killer bees are the only thing tough enough to save a $60 billion per annum migratory bee pollination industry. Honeybees pollinate California's almond crop, for example. Along with apples, pears, peaches, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, soybeans, alfalfa, pumpkins, etc. etc. As for what killed off all the honeybees, at least in northerly latitudes, think agrichemicals and monoculture lawns.
Oak trees are wind pollinated, no bees directly involved. Honeybees do gather spring pollens from wind-pollinated tree species, however, simply as a high-calorie food source when nectar flows are scant.
Nice, thanks! Wish I had mod points to bump this up a notch or two.
I understand reading pdf's on a computer. The concept of ebook, however, seems very recherche to me. Why in the world would buy a reader just to peruse a freely available OUT OF PRINT pdf, ps, or textfile? Or are you talking about something academic and utterly recondite, like Rolf Singer's Agaricales, which retailed at $169, brand new, in 1972 or so and hasn't been seen since, not even gathering dust, except on my bookshelf? I doubt you could pay anyone to scan that one, let along prooofread it, in rny hurnble op1nicri.
There is, of course, a difference between out of print and public domain. Public domain is fair game, provided anything value-added (like correct spelling, modern punctuation, etc.) is your own work if you re-copyright it. I'm not a lawyer, of course, or I'd have drowned myself long ago.
Honeypots are gnu ... er, new? I recall encountering a honeypot site shortly after Gulf War One, "Endearing Sandstorm," or whatever that was. It had photos of the first predator reconnaissance flyer, but nothing to indicate scale except plastic bonding details. It sucked you in to a mysterious set of graphics which seemed to suggest that GPS was "fuzzy" for everyone but the military. I didn't linger. The ratio of effort to detail was set way too high, for something so obviously exposed.
It's amazing how many authors/writers/novelists/biographers about Chaucer's age take notes and squirrel them away. Dunno if there's any sort of indexing system for handwritten stuff, though - does anyone have time to index their own notes, except of course in Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds?
Unfortunately, my experience mirrors yours. I did a couple of years of near-genius work when I was younger. Some of my own code reads like the Book of Revelations to me now. I can barely understand it, and I was never a slacker about inline comments. Apparently, I never knew what a good comment was, or what I'd done that was so noteworthy, because some of those remarks seem downright cryptic to me. I was no Steve Wozniak, ever, but I could write beautiful code once. That mind is a complete stranger to me now, at age 64.
I use FireFox and SQLite Manager to keep a searchable list of memoranda to myself, these days. It helps, it really does. I keep telling myself that.
Exactly. Get real, Canonical. How about a cheapjack $75 version that actually performs as advertised?
Steed, Peel & King calls theirs Mother, speaking of antique fedora.