Paul M

Comment Threads

• guthrie commented on Report on Seat 14C
  That's true, I've not paid much attention to the various racist atheist comments by famous people, or rather it blew up online years ago (a century in internet terms) and all the sensible folk I know have consigned such people to the back of their shelves, as it were, so they just don't get mentioned much. It is very hard to write a good simplify the science book, or indeed history one....
• Elderly Cynic commented on Report on Seat 14C
  "It is very hard to write a good simplify the science book, or indeed history one." Tell me :-( I did and still do teach shared-memory parallel programming to newcomers, and trying to explain that parallel consistency, ordering, synchronicity etc. are not what you would expect is Not Easy. It's not significantly different from the same concepts in special relativity .......
• Pigeon commented on Report on Seat 14C
  Going by the samples you posted on here a while back, I'd say it's harder :)...
• Geoff Hart commented on Report on Seat 14C
  guthrie noted: "It is very hard to write a good simplify the science book, or indeed history one." Very much so, particularly when you're not dealing with a homogeneous audience. Any explanation of something complex will always require some degree of abstraction. ("Ceci n'est pas un pipe."—Magritte, The Treachery of Images) In technical communication (my day job), the goal is to choose a level of abstraction that is suitable for the majority of your audience, with full recognition that you'll baffle many readers and be too simplistic for many others. When Dawkins wrote "The Selfish Gene", he was writing for...
• Julian Bond commented on Report on Seat 14C
  I think Peter Watts just nailed it. https://seat14c.com/future_ideas/37D...