

The drawback with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and analyzed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want. You see there have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly ordering and analyzing all the relevant facts so that they then point naturally toward the right decision. Its funny how many of the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. Port perhaps? Or brandy? The port I think is the better bet, laid down by the college in 1934, one of the finest vintages I think youll find, and on the other hand I dont actually have any brandy. He soared and swooped at the words until they seemed to duck and run for cover. The reader clearly belonged to the school of thought which holds that a sense of the seriousness or greatness of a poem is best imparted by reading it in a silly voice. It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils, came a low growl from somewhere on the table, without undergoing a prefrontal lobotomy. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil.

By the time youve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, youve certainly learned something about it yourself. And thats really the essence of programming. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. Richard continued, What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. So an electric one would be particularly pointless, said Richard. Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work. In skilled hands its a very sophisticated calculating device.

Oh, now, dont underestimate the abacus, said Reg. Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electric abacus, but . These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase too much Mozart was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favor of any given program-scheduling strategy. Professor Urban Chronotis, the Regius Professor of Chronology, or Reg as he insisted on being called, had a memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly, in that it was colorful, flitted prettily hither and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct. She was cross already, of course, but that had been in her own time, so to speak. She felt that now was about the time that she could legitimately begin to feel cross. The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didnt ring. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself. The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. The plot of this novel has much to do with Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
