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Tuesday, September 26, 2000

Reading; Megacorp QA



Read the following sentence:

"Those who believe this may be perfectly correct, and moreover in very good company--except that they cannot call on Einstein as a witness."

Did it make sense to you? I couldn't read it. I run into stuff like this all the time when I'm reading, usually just gloss over it and keep going, though I think it often derails me and throws me into that mode where my eyes are following the words but I'm not actually paying attention any more.

Most people, I gather, have no trouble reading the above sentence. What happened to me was I read it as:

"Those who believe that this may be perfectly correct, and moreover in very good company--except that they cannot call on Einstein as a witness."

I guess I just haven't read enough to have sufficiently broad expectations on grammatical usage, so I get locked into one interpretation and fail to see the others.

Here's my first pass at a complete list of all the (non-technical) books I've read:

  1. Atlas Shrugged
  2. Cryptonomicon
  3. Diamond Age (ick)
  4. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (ick)
  5. The Disposesed (ick -- assigned reading)
  6. Dune (ick)
  7. Ender's Game
  8. Einstein's biography (Folsing; currently reading it)
  9. The Fountainhead
  10. Free at Last (Sudbury School's manifesto; 2 hours...)
  11. Friday (didn't finish it)
  12. Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy (x4)
  13. The Last Immortal
  14. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
  15. Pippi in the South Seas
  16. The Richest Man in Babylon
  17. Rivethead
  18. Snow Crash
  19. Stranger in a Strange Land
  20. Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman
  21. The Truth Machine
  22. What Do You Care What Other People Think? (Feynman)

I've no doubt forgot a bunch, but it wouldn't surprise me if this were more than half of the books I've ever read.

Do I feel handicapped? Only when reading, writing, or trying to relate to well-read humans. Certainly not in thinking or understanding.


Fun with Megacorp QA:

QA: ToFix -- Bookmark filenames can have unlimited length and accept illegal characters.
Simon: ToFix -> NotABug -- Bookmark name field is not a filename -- only for user's information use. No reason to limit user from saying whatever they want there. Analogous to Bookmark names in a web browser.
QA: NotABug -> ToFix -- Microsoft Internet Explorer limits length of bookmark names to 256.
Simon: ToFix -> NotABug -- Submit bug to Microsoft.



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Simon Funk / simonfunk@gmail.com