Greetings from a fellow Dawkinsite. I am 19 years old and live in Vienna. Kinda enjoyed your wager which is very much of something Asimov would do. Especially the "debate" with Franc. I am also interested in memetics, yet the whole thing is rather proto-science, as you surely know. Do you know other resources worth reading, except from Dawkins, Dennett and Blackmore? The Journal of memetics contains some interesting things, yet nothing of real substance, IMO. I reckon so does the alt.memetics newsgroup. Please inform me about anything interesting you came across. Really good webpage you have there. Take care and have fun feeding the trolls!

Darwinspeed to your efforts :-)

"I believe I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science." Charles Darwin

Thank you for your message. I'm sorry to be boring and predictable but I have simply got to express my admiration for your use of English. You are definitely in the top 10% of all my e-mail correspondents as far as use of English goes. Much better than most Americans. Have you got a secret? In would love to know how you do it.

I'm not sure if you have seen it but I have put a page on my site about English becoming the official language of man. terran1.htm I would love some feedback on the idea from somebody from a country that does not use English as its first language. I learned French at school but not very well. There was never any reason for me to learn it, I lacked motivation. I am quite sure that if I had a reason to learn it I would have become fluent.

I have only travelled abroad twice, both times for only a short stay, both holidays won in competitions at work. I only learned enough to thank waiters and ask for the number of my room key. On both occasions I was very impressed with Austria and Germany. I have a cousin called Andreas. My uncle, Barrie Willett, learned German at Birmingham university and went to live in Berlin (West Berlin at the time). He married two German women (consecutively) and raised two families of German children, they were not taught English at home by their bilingual parents. My uncle Barrie is the coolest of my older relatives, he looks very like my father but younger and he smiles more. He works as an interpreter translating English, German and Turkish and probably other languages too.

I have always been a bit of a big kid, when I was in my late twenties I had an urge to go skateboarding again like I had done a bit at school, my uncle Barrie borrowed my board and fell and broke his wrist. My dad would never had done that, too straight laced, he doesn't swear or get drunk.

Haider is the only Austrian ever mentioned in the British media. For most English people Austria is just somewhere to go to ski. I have never had enough spare money to do it and now I'm too unfit to start.

I apologize for not having replied earlier. I spent two weeks in Italy, relaxing. The weather was fairly bad, but hey, one can get by with excellent food, playing bridge for hours and reading Doug Hofstadter's marvellous book Gödel, Escher, Bach. :-)

Thank you for your message.

" I'm sorry to be boring and predictable but I have simply got to express my admiration for your use of English. You are definitely in the top 10% of all my e-mail correspondents as far as use of English goes. Much better than most Americans. Have you got a secret? I would love to know how you do it."

Why, thank you very much. You cannot bore me with compliments, yet I'm afraid I am the one who is predictable: if there is a secret, it's simply reading a lot. I do not mean the stuff that teachers use to suffocate you in.

What use is reading Shakespeare if you are not in the mood (if only it were Shakespeare; more likely it's "The teenage problems of Alice" or something of that kind). Learning a language (especially English, which is all around you to begin with) is really not that difficult. The trick is to find authors you like, watch television programs you like and talk to people you like talking to. Then one automatically starts thinking in that language (although at first it will be like babytalk for the most part). That was the first step for me, not the last (which is what most teachers tell you). I am at a complete loss as how to learn a language in any other way. I also "learned" French in school, at which I am doing very badly.

Most of the time it was expected to memorize "Rosetta stones" (as I call them). Learning vocabularies by heart. I think this is complete nonsense. I really fail to see why Cryptography would help anyone at learning a language. Maybe at deciphering (dubbing it into your mother tongue). Certainly not at learning it. I think that is the reason why people in non-English speaking countries are having trouble using proper English in everyday life as opposed to professional life (you'd be surprised to how good even elderly people speak English at lectures, while almost no-one attends English cinema, although the Original versions are always superior. Why, I even watch French movies, although I don't get every third word or so.)

Of course I learned the basics of English in school. After that, it was mainly a nuisance. I am grateful to my teachers, though, since they let me have my way. They even let me choose Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy" as my special topic for my matura (equivalent to your A-levels).

Most people do not take my rantings seriously and think that the current system is fine. I find it curious that the most successful school for learning languages is Berlitz, whose method is simply to begin medias in res. Start talking. No memorization of grammar or vocabularies. I also have found someone, with a little more credentials than I have, who holds rather similar views on education: Roger Schank.

If you are interested, a lot of his articles are online

schank

That's enough ranting about education. Thank you for having stayed with me.

"I'm not sure if you have seen it but I have put a page on my site about English becoming the official language of man. I would love some feedback on the idea from somebody from a country that does not use English as its first language. "

Actually, I have read most if not all of your articles. I am spending way too much time online ... Anyway, I found it refreshing to find somebody who really questions things. Most people I know just assume that anything has a valid raison d'être which would become apparent once one spends more time with it (which they usually don't.) What an attitude! One may never be wrong, but what use is that if one is never right, either. One isn't even consistent, since there is no way to deal with, say, people who maintain that Genetic Engineering is extremely dangerous and some white-bearded Professor who says he understands and respects fears but the situation is really not that bad. Everybody must have a point? Well, they can't.

I can agree with your articles, for the most part, notwithstanding some points which I would have preferred to state in a different way. There is only one thing so far which I think is downright wrong: In your article "Crazed jottings" you state that "Glass is the perfect material for windows. It is a terrible material for walls. Glass lets light in and allows heat through. In summer a glass building is far too hot. In winter you cannot afford to heat it." Actually, glass is a rather good insulator, easily one of the best. I'm pretty positive on this one, I have listened to, and even participating in, rather long discussions about heating houses in general and the type of house that doesn't require heating at all in particular (I think in English that would be a self-sustaining house, I'm not sure).

One of my colleagues in the army is a lawyer who just got his degree, another one actually makes a living at construction work (as some kind of manager). The three of us were doing the work of one, on second thought, there wasn't any work to be done except kissing the boots of our commanding officer (which we didn't. There are times when it's great to have a lawyer nearby). Jürgen, the lawyer, got interested in a lot of stuff to bridge the time between getting shouted at in the morning and having dinner in the early afternoon: Kendo (Japanese swordfighting), Guns and knives, and self-sustaining houses. The latter was just perfect for endless discussions between Jürgen, who learned about self-sustaining houses in books and Herbert, who has experience with real construction work and pretty much scoffed at the very idea of self-sustaining houses, which are to expensive for even a lawyer to afford. But I digress. Glass is a great insulator (which is why a self-sustained house can store heat during the summer and slowly give it off in winter, which is why it doesn't require heating, which is why one breaks even after a few decades, centuries at most. Still, a neat idea). Problem is, the space between the frame and the wall usually lets heat pass through. That is either solved by having the whole wall made of glass (don't worry, you will break even in maybe two decades, notwithstanding the salary of the window-wipers) or by actually thinking when mounting the window-frame into the wall (which, according to Herbert, Construction workers never do as a rule. They are also not interested at all in your future gas or electricity bills).

If you are assured that your house is well insulated thanks to the numerous insulation chambers that solve the problem of fitting your windows to your walls, then bear in mind that if one insulation chamber doesn't help you much (which it does) then more of them won't help you either (says Herbert who scoffs at insulation chambers) ... I will stop here for risk of boring you, please be assured that I could go on like this for days (we did).

"I learned French at school but not very well. There was never any reason for me to learn it, I lacked motivation. I am quite sure that if I had a reason to learn it I would have become fluent."

When in Austria, do not let on that you are impressed with Germany (except maybe in the western regions. Traitors!)

Your piece about your Uncle reminds me of my grandmother. Great women, still going strong at 86. She was raised in rather bourgeois surroundings in Hungary. She was forced to flee to Austria with her three children after the Soviets quelled the Hungarian revolution. She lost everything, started to work like a madman and having arrived here with little or no knowledge of the German language, before too long she was teaching German (as well as Russian, English, Hungarian, I think French too). Today she still works as an Interpreter.

Thanks to our mind-bogglingly stupid and therefore immensely successful campaigns of our tourism industry, the world thinks of Austria as a place where Kangaroos are skiing down snowy hills while locals are sitting in a café addressing each other as "Herr Graf".

Well, this was rather long. I would love to hear from you again in the future.

Yours, Andreas (a.k.a. Darwinian)

"I believe I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science." Charles Darwin

The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy! That takes me right back, to 1978 I think, I caught it the first time around as the original radio series. I can still hear the signature tune in my head. That was one of the finest pieces of writing ever, any language, any genre. It has had a big effect on the way I think. Surreal, lateral thinking and full of irony and humour. OK, he got bits badly wrong. Especially Marvin the "manic depressive" robot. He wasn't ever manic. Severely depressed with a justified sense of paranoia, hardly surprising, brain the size of a planet and they ask him to open the airlock, it's natural that he won't enjoy it.

Do you have any English word processors? Word processors with English spell checks? I am not hinting that you can't spell, as I put it before you do better than most of the Americans who write to me, but everybody makes mistakes, as the hedgehog said as he climbed off the hairbrush... I have a huge collection of CD ROMs with free demonstration software on them. Several of them have fully functioning word processors with spell checkers on them, if you could use it I will gladly post one to you. I even have them with spell check and grammar check as well. That might be a good tool to refine your English further, a teacher who never tires of correcting you. Just a thought.

I know what you mean about learning language through books some teacher thinks will be worthy and stimulating. Chicks stuff. OK, Shakespeare could write quite well but his stuff is of its time, old fashioned language and heavy going even for modern native English speakers. Any thing more than 150 years old takes an effort to read. I found Darwin very easy, John Stuart Mill was readable too but most stuff earlier than that, unless in a modern translation, is hard to read. The fundamentalists favourite King James Bible is very hard to understand easily as it has been translated between languages and eras with various degrees of inaccuracy.

You didn't say if you agreed with me about English becoming the universal language of man. Naturally I am a little biased. I found learning English was childsplay. Do you think there should be a universal language, should it be a second language for everybody or should everybody learn one common first language?

You must be a pretty weird person if the only thing you disagree with me about is glass walls. You must be as weird as me.

Things I like about Austria and Germany:- everything is free, attractive women ask you if you want drinks every few minutes, they smile at you even when you are drunk and loud....hey, maybe that is just because I was on holiday? Possibly. But anyway I really enjoyed both my short stays and I liked the people I met. I suppose they were a self-selected sample of the more intelligent and anglophone people but I got the distinct impression that in comparison to the civilized parts of Europe England is not that special. We just have the advantage of speaking the same language as the USA. But that is like saying Earth is an unremarkable planet, apart from the fact that it is inhabited.

Or apart from that Mrs Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?

Would you have any objection to me putting this stuff on my site?

I just cut and paste, only removing the odd particularly personal bit. I'll wait until there is a little more material. Let me have it; anything that is remotely relevant to the stuff on the site already. If I know that the stuff is going to appear on the site later I can write as much as I feel like, without feeling guilty about wasting time. I don't have a lot of spare time each week but I enjoy writing. In many ways letter writing is easier than writing pages, I just write to the person but I also know that some other people may well be acting as voyeurs as well. But I don't have to worry too much about what they think, they are jus t looking in.

[ If I do put your stuff on the site would you want me to correct any spelling mistakes for you or leave it as I receive it? I sometimes correct a few mistakes that Rob makes, and some of mine that I did not spot first time around. I find it is better for the webpage to reply as a full letter rather than a paragraph at a time, this gives me the chance to come up with new subject headers each time too, these usually don't end up on the site but they can be funny.]

I was in a rather weird mood when writing that letter. Thanks for answering. To start with, you can use any material I write to you for publication, provided only you don't deliberately quote me out of context, which I'm certain you wouldn't do. It follows that you are free to correct spelling mistakes or even sentence structure and snip at will.

Speaking of spelling mistakes, no, I do not have a Spellchecker, except the one that came with winword, which is done by Microsoft and therefore creates worse problems than it solves. I would gladly talk about anything you care to discuss, so talking about the prospects of a world language would be fine at the moment (I only indirectly alluded to that in my previous letter when ranting about education). I have reread your article on world language and, while heartily agreeing that a planetary culture is highly desirable, I am less convinced that language will take us all the way. Not that it couldn't, I'm just not convinced that English will reach fixation in the memepool (to take the analogy to genetics a bit too far).

I'd like to see that, yet I don't expect it. Why? Think of family names. It was once fashionable to believe that all surnames will become extinct except one. The logic was, since new names don't come into existence but old ones may die out (with a probability of 1/4 in a family with two children), it was only a matter of time before all would vanish but one. That logic is fallacious. Several surnames may coexist for ever. There may be a finite probability for each name to disappear within a generation, but that probability may become infinitely small; I'm not well versed with the mathematical concept of infinity, sufficient to say that this is undoubtedly true for, say, the next few centuries. Similarly, while the number of different languages has fallen dramatically and English is constantly on the rise, that doesn't mean that it will ever dominate the "language pool", let alone anytime soon.

Spanish is also a highly versatile language, arguably more beautiful and as easy to learn as English (not that beauty is necessarily conducive to a language's prospects, think of Latin versus Greek). Russian and Chinese (Northern version) are at least holding on to their positions, as far as I know. So while English will win a few more easy victories (especially in the business world), I think it's expansion will slowly decline and come to a halt.

Think of South-America. While probably more and more people will learn to speak English, I can't really imagine them dropping Spanish altogether (like in the brilliant movie "Starship Troopers"). English may invade their workplaces, it will not invade their homes. On the other hand, Spanish is on the rise in the US. Who can say whether it will become the second official language over there?

As far as Europe is concerned, French will prove to be as difficult to get rid of as the HI-Virus. Speaking for Austria, young people often use a (degenerated) version of English, yet I am sceptical whether English can establish itself as a real opponent to German, let alone vanquish it. So will there be a divided world maybe with Hispanics as 2nd rate citizens (like they are presented as in the US)? I'd like to think not, since a planetary culture does not necessarily depend on a planetary language. While I think of the world's numerous languages as a nuisance and, using Denett's terminology, an essentially QWERTY phenomenon (your keyboard being the way it is since adjacent keys were subject to jam in ancient keyboards), I was mildly surprised of the reply Richard Dawkins gave me when I asked him to comment on a thesis of Susan Blackmore's book: That plenty of old memes which were transmitted essentially from parent to child are giving way to new ones better equipped to deal in a world were horizontal meme transmission is ubiquitous, the world's meme pool becoming more uniform as a result. He said that it would make him rather sad to see all the old stories even the myths to die out. In a way he's right. So I'm looking forward to seeing a multilingual future; Dawkins' books are translated into many languages, after all ;-)

See you. Andreas

I am not predicting that English will become the language of man I am suggesting that it should.

To get a universal human culture is going to be very difficult, to do it with a multitude of languages is going to be that much harder. I hear a lot of people go on about McDonalds, Coca-Cola and MTV taking over the world culture and reducing it, making it weaker and worthless. I disagree.

Globalization is allowing us to learn from all cultures. The better parts of the culture survive. In England there is a vanishing culture typified by the Mayday celebrations that my father has been involved in since he was a boy.

My grandfather Richard Willett (Big Dick Willett) leading one of his beloved horses in Knutsford's May Day parade.	My father, aged 12, Crown Bearer, Knutsford Mayday, 1947. Why in a kilt??? And who nicked the crown?

But it is a hollow culture, the symbols of ancient pagan rites are so weakened and distorted that they would not be recognized by a real English pagan. And all the modern new age pagans are just a bunch of hippies who have reinvented ancient traditions in exactly the same way as the people of Knutsford reinvented their Mayday celebrations with revivals of traditions that were dead. There is no deep significance in any of it, just an excuse to have a big fun-fair visit the town.

Languages divide people. Just look at Belgium or Canada. Peaceful nations at peace with themselves but still dividing bitterly over language issues. A common language helps unite people. Just look at England, Wales, Scotland, The USA, Australia, New Zealand etc. There have been relatively few wars between people who speak the same language, and far more long term alliances across national divides not complicated by language differences. Once language groups have united into nations they have a tendency to stay together, even if they required wars to unite them in the first place e.g. Italy and Germany.

This thesis is on shaky ground, I know, as there are a lot of exceptions, but I think that the balance of evidence is just about in favour of the assertion that language barriers encourage more conflict than they avoid. I want to see a united world in which every man thinks of every man as his neighbour.

To turn around the Christian fundamentalist's often asked question, what would Jesus do? Do you really think Jesus would tell people to stick to their nations and unite against the foreigner? Would Jesus approve of a welfare state alongside an anti-immigration policy? Every man is your neighbour. If there should be a welfare state it should be universal, it should take in the whole world. That is my suggestion. A single state, a welfare state, taking in every man. (I use man to include woman and child, I hate feminist language and I hate the term human being).

I see a unified language culture as a good step in that desirable direction, and I see English as being the best available candidate for the job of universal language. My plan for the medium term would be for Britain to go to the European Union and make a deal. We would offer a virtual unconditional surrender. We dump the pound, imperial measurement, the royal family, the City of London, the Sellafield nuclear plant, the British nuclear deterrent and opposition to laws on the ingredients in sausages and chocolate. We would allow every school in Britain to be named after a Frenchman and turn every pub into a bistro. Just one little concession in return, make English the one and only official European language.

That would be it. Britain would fling itself fully into Europe and be at the heart of it. That would be a wonderful future for Britain, for Europe and for humanity. A new identity would grow up in Europe that was an amalgamation of all the best features of European culture. The USA would be asking to join within a generation.

I would not like to see German, French or even Welsh die out, just to resume a secondary role. I think a bilingual education would be best for most people. Teach all children two languages from as early an age as possible in order that they become fluent in both, able to both talk and think in either language. If I had to choose an extra language to learn myself I think I would choose German. A language that sounds like swearing all the time. A language in which you can express any sentiment, and usually in a single word.

Long time no e-mail. Is everything all right with you? Why no contact, have you discovered girls or something?

Hello Martin,

sorry for not writing sooner. The discovery of girls lies back some time now, I believe it was published in "Nature" or at least in the "Journal of Good Ideas".

Anyway, I've enrolled at Vienna University. I wanted to study cognitive science, alas, that was impossible. There are many efforts being made to establish cognitive science as a regular discipline, some focus heavily on the molecular level (neuroscience), others more on AI. Yet all those efforts haven't yet led to a regular discipline and are unlikely to do so in the future.

However, there are a handful of people who opted for the hard way and are doing irregular courses, who were very helpful. In a nutshell, I officially study philosphy now (for technical reasons - the philosophy department isn't strict about what path leads to enlightenment :-) and will probably switch to a "studium irregulare", meaning a self-designed one, later on.

Currently I have taken up courses ranging from AI to neurobiology, evolutionary biology and (neuro)psychology.

I am quite comfortable with the situation at the moment, although there is of course the nagging feeling of uncertainty involved. While I haven't even commited myself to a certain discipline (I have still to specialize within cognitive science), as a would have if I had studied medicine, biology or psychology, I have commited myself to spending substantial portions of my life abroad - while there are some strides being made within the EU, cognitive (neuro)science is mostly done in the US.

Of course, I'm still young and can still change my mind (and career) completely, but I think this is unlikely.

While evolution has some impact on cognitive science, I spend probably an disproportional amount of time reading books and attending lectures on it. Must be viral influences of Dawkins ...

Luckily, there is an institute (privately funded) located in the vicinity of vienna, the Konrad Lorenz Institute (kli) for Evolution and Cognition Research. (http://www.univie.ac.at/evolution/kli/) They continue to draw an impressive array of scientists, that is probably partly due to the extremely pleasant atmosphere there.

Robert Brandon, a philosopher of biology (there is little or no difference between a theoretical biologist and a philosopher of biology), recently gave a talk about the environment, which I found rather illuminating. The interesting thing was that his outlook on evolution - while relying heavily on Dick Lewontin - is more than compatible with Richard Dawkins' works, if not a step further at least as far population biology is concerned.

Other people coming up this year include David Hull, whom you probably know as the one who coined the evolver-interactor ditinction, much like Dawkins' own replicator-vehicle distinction (Robert Brandon's talk centered heavily on such matters, too). Hull will speak about memetics (You might want to read his abstract

ASTB%200001

I can hardly wait. I also look forward to hearing from Karl Sigmund.

Well, that's all from me for this time.

Keep up the good work.

See you

Andi a.k.a. Darwinian

The discovery of girls. You have got to be careful and keep things in the right perspective, I can't advise on what that is. You need to balance the needs of the brain with those of your biological urges. Simply understanding what your urges are and where they come from does not eliminate them. It doesn't even reduce them.

Have you seen the slightly compromising pictures of the delectable Mrs Dawkins on my site?

Guide

A bit on the thin side for my current tastes but she really got my pulse going at the time. A phrase (used of another woman) comes to mind, The thinking man's crumpet.

I have got to say I am jealous of you starting an exciting course of studies like that, especially as you have such a clear idea of what you want to do. I have never had a clue. I plan a meal at a time at best. To be starting out and shaping your course as you go must be exciting. My course at University was an open social science degree starting with five equal subjects; politics, economics, history, geography and sociology. When I started I knew I was going to study economics. Then about two weeks into the course somebody said "let's call that theta" and I said, no, let's not shall we? Equations? No thanks! I had been the brightest student at economics before I went to University, but I would not get involved with a subject that used equations instead of words. I ended up doing politics in the second year plus one extra bit in sociology, the final year was all politics.

Cognitive science seems a great subject. It might make you rich, it will never make you bored. But keep your options open, you never know what may happen, you might hit against a brick wall and find the subject you love is not done the way you want to work. You might discover a whole new field that is fascinating and you can do easily what others struggle to do. But I can see you have a real thirst for knowledge, you will do well at whatever you choose.

I have got my site up to 3 MB now. There should be something there to keep you occupied when you fancy a debate, I have room for another 17 MB.

Godel, Escher, Bach. I didn't know what you were going on about. I have now just found a copy of The Mind's I (edited by Hofstadter and Dennett) and I am loving it, something will come of it, but I am not sure what.

Can I ask your advice? I have just come up with a great slogan for my site, Viagra for the... but should it brain, mind, intellect or what?

Hi Martin!

Sorry, I really seem to take my time answering your letters! I'll try to compensate for that. First, let me say a few general things on your work. I rather like the idea of making your thoughts accessible to everybody else in the form of a webpage. I can't understand why lots of people are bored when there is a whole world out there to comprehend! At the moment I'm trying to turn this hobby into a profession, but even if I fail, it will always be a hobby. The notion of sharing that is a great idea. One might think that it is ubiquitous in the internet, but it isn't. Many personal webpages can neatly be matched to the chapters of a textbook of psychiatry.

That is reflected in the layout and interactive parts of the Meme Machine. It is not above average in design quality and does not use the latest flash-tech or whatnot. Then again, a serious piece can hardly reflect the latest hypes. I believe the Meme Machine is a lot above average when it comes to functionality (especially when compared to sites which are reworked regularly). Of course, you seem to be playing around with graphics a lot, but that's OK. I'm reading Feynman at the moment. He calls it the disease of computers ;-). He goes on the describe how one of the first computers, which was meant to calculate some properties of the nuclear bomb in Los Alamos, was used primarily for playing around with maths and other things.

I like the new designs. Just for fun I tried to extrapolate in my mind the design of 2004 from the changes you made - the result looks weird ;-).

I like your way of thinking. When everybody says A I like peole who say B, whatever B is (provided they think about B and A as well). Recently, the most depressing case of people saying A without thinking was the (bilateral) "sanctions" on Austria by the other countries of the EU. Every single one suddenly believed they were wrong. Every Newspaper, even people who usually think for themselves. No one seemed to even have entertained a different hypothesis. I couldn't bring anyone to think about it, either. I think experiences like that are what keeps people optimistic about memetics.

Problem is, even though I like to hear B, however improbable at first glance, one can overdo it. That was why I made such a lot of fuss about glass as an insulator. While I think it's important to have somebody question the assumptions taken for granted by architects and laypeople alike, those assumptions will usually hold "true", in the sense of useful. While I find it particularly interesting that you are skeptical not only on the "usual" (religion, human nature, the works) but also on the more mundane, I sometimes have the nagging feeling that you overdo it a bit, especially when talking about so many things, since there are bound to be some you know only very little about. However, I find it hard to disagree, since I do not know enough about, say, architecture, either, and presuambly because I find it hard not to embrace that kind of thinking, since I probably would very much like the "revolutionary" rationale to prevail. I think it might in the end, some version anyway, but it won't come as easy as that.

Anyway, when I disagree on the glass, who cares anyway? What I meant was the rationale behind that, not just some minor details. Again, I quite like that rationale, probably a lot too much.

So I sometimes get the picture of Don Quichote and Sisiphus in joint assault on some windmills. (Hey, that is as close as I ever come to the "other" intellectual way of thinking!)

Godel, Escher, Bach. I didn't know what you were going on about. I have now just found a copy of The Mind's I (edited by Hofstadter and Dennett) and I am loving it, something will come of it, but I am not sure what.

You hit the nail on the head. I am also not sure what will come of it (I'm reading it now). As with Gödel (ö! ;-), Escher, Bach. It is as close to Dawkins as anyone will ever get, yet it is very hard to use for practical purposes, yet (especially Gödel, Escher, Bach), improves one's mind - I'm sounding like the Jehova's Witnesses I know. The Mind's I will give you an anchor to understand current debates in cognitive science and the like, at least. The pieces are classic, meaning they do not reflect the current frontier of science, but current science reflects their way of thinking about problems.

So be sure to read Gödel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid (GEB - EGB: I'll never know more than a tenth of the things which can be illuminated by those letters), if you haven't done so already (What were you doing in the Eighties, anyway?)! On second thought, the fact that everybody seemed to talk about GEB doesn't imply that many people actually read it.

What I can also recommend to you is John Allen Paulos' books (starting with Innumaracy). His home page:

http://www.math.temple.edu/~paulos/

whoscounting

The above is his monthly column in ABC. Very good, some is taken from his books (or the other way round?). His writings on the Internet are more accessible than his books. Cheaper, in a nutshell.

One of the many other books I'm reading at the moment (I'm hopeless) is the aforementionened "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" by Richard Feynman. It contains episodes from his life, which are funny by themselves, but blow your head off as a collection. Somehow that great physicist never grew up. Do you know the battle between Dirk Gentley and his cleaning lady in Doug Adams' "A long Dark Tea-time of the Soul"? This is child's play compared to his exploits!

Can I ask your advice? I have just come up with a great slogan for my site, Viagra for the... but should it brain, mind, intellect or what?

Intellect is no good IMHO. I don't like Viagra for the Brain, but that might be due to my radically monist stance. Mind is better, mind-brain has a nice touch, although it's a bit clumsy. Viagra for the Soul sounds encouragingly blashemic.

BTW why did Japan send 100 million bottles of viagra to the US?

They heard they couldn't get a proper election.

lg Andi a.k.a. Darwinian

ps lg means Liebe Grüße.

I am not sure how to take the "not above average in design quality". I have tried to keep the design simple and effective, in that way I think it has been well designed rather than over-designed. Tasteful minimalism. Understated design like the shape of a Mercedes compared to a Ford with whatever bit of stuck on shapes happen to be fashionable at the time. I have considered putting in a lot more fancy stuff but I always come back to the same issue, is it worth my time to do it compared to investing the time in writing a new page? Usually the minimalist approach, the lazy approach and the too-busy-for-trivia approach all point me in the same direction.

When my day off corresponds with a time of maximum creativity I write new pages. When the creativity is at a medium level I play with graphics. When it is very low I correct old mistakes. Umm. Interesting, in a newspaper who would get paid the most? Editor, writer or graphic artist?

"Just for fun I tried to extrapolate in my mind the design of 2004 from the changes you made - the result looks weird ;-)"

I could not do that without the help of drugs. If you could send me a summary of what you imagined I will give it some consideration. I have been thinking about evolving the site into something marketable, something that could at least finance itself although if I could work out a way to make a living doing it that would be bliss. Any money making angle must keep the fun element in it. That is a very difficult trick to pull off. I am musing about the possibility of some kind of a book as a longer tern goal. I think the site needs to be significantly more popular before that becomes viable.

Glass.

Try this simple experiment, either in real life of in thought if you prefer. Take two sheets of material about 10 mm thick, one glass, one smooth wood. Place them inside a deep freeze at -25° Celsius for three hours. Then pull down your pants and place your bare buttocks on the two sheets, one cheek on wood, one cheek on glass. Then tell me why you think glass is a good insulator.

Glass is an excellent insulator of electricity but it conducts heat efficiently and it allows heat to radiate through it. Another simple test is to sit in a parked car on a frosty day and feel the infra red energy radiate out from your body into the cold beyond. What did I do in the '80s? Sat in parked cars on the tops of mountains communicating by radio. I can tell you that glass is a very poor insulator of heat. I was actually warmer in a tent than in my car, although the car did have the benefit of a heater. You have heard of sabbatical years? I took a sabbatical decade.

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I can't find out how to make this letter easily, I did notice that it wasn't a regular o. If I need another I will have to cut and paste again. My keyboard is as linguistically challenged as I am. I will think some more about the viagra line. I found a little picture of a viagra tablet in a newspaper and the idea for a slogan leapt almost fully formed into my mind in one step, perhaps the unconscious process that generated the original idea would finish the job for me sometime soon.

Martin