If you know your algorithms and data structures, and have a firm grasp of the architecture of modern computer systems, you'll be way ahead of a depressingly large proportion of people with degrees in CS that come past me in interviews.

The most informative and entertaining book I can recommend on algorithms is Bentley's "Programming Pearls".

A wonderful deleted scene in "The Life of Brian" has shepherds in the fields around Bethlehem wondering "is it AD yet?"

I love being lectured in logic by a person who ritually cannibalizes a god's zombified offspring because a talking snake tricked a mud-man's rib-wife with magic fruit.

... we're supposed to treat these clowns with respect and allow their weird Sunday-morning social clubs to have tax-exempt status in the US?

And the Catholics are supposed to be the *smart* ones, too!

Did you really just spell "ceased" like that?

I explicitly said that they have at least one child named Mary. They could have two; it still works out.

Yes, I assume that not every girl is named Mary.

Okay, if you don't get the problem (and yes it is correctly stated), there are three things you can do to improve your understanding.

1) Write a simple computer program in your language of choice to generate a billion random two-children families and count the ones that meet the conditions.
2) Draw a Venn diagram.
3) Read up on Bayes' theorem.

A family with two children is chosen at random from a large population.

If I tell you only that they have at least one daughter, what is the probability that both children are girls?

Most people can get that one (it's 1/3), but fail miserably on this question:

If I tell you only that they have at least one child named Mary, what is the probability that both children are girls?

Assume the obvious: the boy/girl ratio is 50-50 and only girls are named Mary.

Most people insist that this is the same question with the same answer, but no, it's not, and the answer is actually 50%.

If you don't get this puzzle, you don't understand conditional probability.

What else would I need? A decent text editor that interacts well with the Unix environment around it. I use aoeui.

Christians know that "it was a small, tailed, probably tree-climbing, and now extinct primateâ"from a kind created on Day 6 of Creation Week."

You know, I'd hate evolution too, if it had done to me what it has done to the godtards.