[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>] 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:
- Atlas Shrugged
- Cryptonomicon
- Diamond Age (ick)
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (ick)
- The Disposesed (ick -- assigned reading)
- Dune (ick)
- Ender's Game
- Einstein's biography (Folsing; currently reading it)
- The Fountainhead
- Free at Last (Sudbury School's manifesto; 2 hours...)
- Friday (didn't finish it)
- Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy (x4)
- The Last Immortal
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
- Pippi in the South Seas
- The Richest Man in Babylon
- Rivethead
- Snow Crash
- Stranger in a Strange Land
- Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman
- The Truth Machine
- 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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