Re: Rather Polite of Him, Wouldn't You Say?

docdwarf@panix.com wrote:
> In article <1164045562.179587.56900@h54g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> Alistair <alistair@ld50macca.demon.co.uk> wrote: 
>
> [snip - I apologise to myself for the midsentence interruption]
> 
>
> Perhaps so, perhaps no... in addition to living longer there's a little
> matter of attracting mates... and then the process of mating... and then
> the viability of the offspring generated by such mating... it can be seen
> as moderately intricate, once one thinks along those lines... of course,
> the problem with that might be, for some, instead of relying on the dicta
> of fiction-authors they, themselves, might have to do something called
> 'thinking'... I think.
>
> DD

Methinks that the law of large numbers is on my side. Also,
remember that it is written thus: the m shall inherit the earth.

In article <1164056885.578571.326160@f16g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
Alistair <alistair@ld50macca.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>docdwarf@panix.com wrote: 
>
>Methinks that the law of large numbers is on my side.

I can neither agree nor disagree, Mr Maclean... as with politesse, I'm not
familiar with the quantification of the phenomena in question.

>Also,
>remember that it is written thus: the m shall inherit the earth.

Note the lack of mechanism posited, Mr Maclean... there might be lawyers
involved.

DD

"Pete Dashwood" (dashwood@removethis.enternet.co.nz) writes:
> Thanks for this Kelly.
>
> Interesting to see the blip in the statistics regarding women and Maths. I
> suspect it has been rectified today. The last project I managed had more
> women than men on the team, and some of them were simply outstanding
> .(professionally :-))

In Weinber's 1971 "The Psychology of Computer Programming" he made some
mention of women in computing. I remember one annecdote where some of the
female members of a project team were working overtime and some security
guard tries to shoo them out of the building, informing them that they
can't be in the building without a manager's approval, then get's blown
away by one of of the women telling him that she is the manager and has
approved the overtime work.

That was also the book where he describes how some enterprise decided to
use a get together of all it's top IT staff to subject them to a barrage
of psych tests intended to develop a profile which could be used to
predict programming success. The well researched questionaires asked people
to answere questions such as "Do you often get headaches because you have
to concentrate at work?" Wienberg noted that anyone who answered Yes would
probably not make a good programmer. Before the second round of tests the
fellow administering them foolishly asked if there were any questions. One
of the IT gs put up his hand and asked if they should use the same
personality on the second round of tests they had on the first. The
administrator got very upset and stated that all the profound questions were
to be answered fully and honestly. The g's reponse was "what sort of fool
s
do you take us for", at which point the room erupted in laughter.

> Only because this is a specialist newsgroup, and not because I really care
,
> I think that the IBM 360-145 you mentioned, is actually an IBM 370-145...
> :-)  I seem to recall the 360 range having two digit model numbers, but I 
am
> getting old and it was a long time ago :-).

Well, it did have a number of processor registers that didn't seem to be in
use with the software that was available when it first arrived.