A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do.
Gordon Way, brother of Susan, employer of Richard MacDuff, was a rich man, the founder and owner of WayForward Technologies II. WayForward Technologies itself had of course gone bust, for the usual reason, taking his entire first fortune with it.
It seems to me that the whole field of humour could benefit from close and immediate scrutiny. Clearly we need to sort out the jokes which have any kind of genuine psychological value from those which merely encourage drug abuse and should be stopped.
Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression “it turns out” to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is.
Not content with ignoring the normal requirements of biology, the cat was also in clear breach of the laws of physics.
The theology of this seemed a little confused, reflected Dirk, but what was one tiny extra droplet of misinformation in such a raging torrent?
Big, bulbous, ruddy buildings with vast ballrooms, grand, angular staircases, and as many turrets and crenellations as a recreational condom. The.
So what we have arrived at here – and although the first shock wave of this arrival was in 1859, it’s really the arrival of the computer that demonstrates it unarguably to us – is “Is there really a universe that is not designed from the top downward, but from the bottom upward? Can complexity emerge from lower levels of simplicity?
In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time and had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that wants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will lend it some.
She remembered wondering what it was that the Albanians exported in such an anonymous way, but when on one occasion she had looked it up, she found that their only export was electricity – which, if she remembered her high school physics correctly, was unlikely to be moved around in lorries.
Between you and me, sir, I would’ve been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them.
Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion.
Why?’ is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it.
The socially correct way of pouring tea is to put the milk in after the tea. Social correctness has traditionally had nothing whatever to do with reason, logic, or physics. In fact, in England it is generally considered socially incorrect to know stuff or think about things. It’s worth bearing this in mind when visiting.
If it could not possibly be done, then obviously it had been done impossibly. The question was how?
First you had to fight the Stones fans, which was tricky because they fought dirty and had their knuckles nearer the ground.
He decided to feel sorry for himself. That would pass the time.
For the next two weeks I took up playing in the traffic, being careless with kitchen knives, and neglecting to stand clear of the doors on station platforms, but, sadly, I led a charmed life, and I had to go through with it: four weeks of the greatest humiliation and embarrassment known to man or, rather, to that most easily humiliated and embarrassed of all creatures, the overgrown twelve-year-old boy.
Shall I leave the window open or would you like to try the door?” she said with a sniff.
Richard stared in disbelief. “You say there’s a horse in your bathroom, and all you can do is stand there naming Beatles songs?