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From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: Almost (but not completely) unrelated by now to Minsky's
         new article. 
Organization: The Armory
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 1994 14:08:27 GMT
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           <D164FE.68s@armory.com> <1994Dec21.182700.2540@news.media.mit.edu>
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In article <1994Dec21.182700.2540@news.media.mit.edu>,
Marvin Minsky <minsky@media.mit.edu> wrote:
>In article <D164FE.68s@armory.com> rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
>writes:
>>In article <3d7nn4$52m@crl10.crl.com>, Walter Raisanen <azi@crl.com> wrote:
>>>Richard Steven Walz (rstevew@armory.com) wrote:
>>>: ! ... !!!
>>>[ ... and a whole passel more of them ...]
>>>Steve, you should know that god allots to man a fixed number of !'s.
>>>You are using yours up at a prodigious rate.  Have a care.
>>>Also, try decaf.  It will lower your blood pressure.
>>>Merry Christmas, Wally
>>----------------------------------
>>Haven't used stimulants since 1979! I'm actually quite sedate. But periods
>>somehow just don't Do it for me! See! Ilike some of the larger, prettier
>>characters in the extended ASCII set. Maybe I'll take to using the upper
>>bit as well; THEN I can put such things as , or , or  in my sentences as
>>delimiters! And if there were a fixed number of bangs, (!'s), then C and
>>UNIX programmers would all be dead by now!!!;->
>>Happy Solstice, Steve :-)
>>-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com
>
>Don't let them slow you down.  When I was a kid, strangers were always
>saying things like "Take it easy," and stuff like that.  (But not my
>parents, thank goodness.)
>
>It may be true about the fixed number of '!'s though.  My orthopedist
>(who rebuilt my ankle after I tried a wrong-footed leap) agrees that a
>person may have a fixed number of high-impact steps to take before the
>articular cartilages wear down; these are among the few tissues that
>don't repair themselves after injury.  So he's negative about such
>exercises as jogging.
>
>I feel obliged to add, because of posting to c.a.p., that there has
>been recent claims for evidence that in order to keep smart you should
>spend time solving hard problems.  For this, I suspect, one
>should do high-impact ones while avoiding anaerobic thinking--e.g., trying
>to define consciousness, or asking the meaning of Turing tests.
---------------------------------------
Well, folks for which Zen is not easy should definitely NOT DO IT!!!;-)
Actually it's the easiest conclusion to come to, sort of a Chuang Tsu's
Razor!! The easiest conclusion to come to is never to conclude! Oh, and did
you hear that we have now been growing cartilage that will reimplant, in the
laboratory, and that re-lining knees and such is going to work just fine,
according to some trial surgeries now done and up!! *I* have old athlete's
kness as well. I'm not a youngin'! I'm inches from 45!! So telling me to
slow down at this late date when I didn't know I was speeding is a bit too
little, and way way too late! Thanks, Marvin. :-)
-Steve Walz  rstevew@armory.com

