As a proud owner of a Kurzeill K2600xs keyboard, I know that his biggest weakness is making interfaces, because the one his (otherwise wonderful) keyboards suck. In fact, they even suck on his subsequent keyboards. He's a brilliant guy, but he just can't make a good interface. I shudder to think what his brain interface would be like.

Having spent a bit of my youth as a "Born Again" Christian (I lean towards secular Buddhism now), I noticed that there are quite a few engineers who also see themselves as fundamentalist Christians. I think that it's not so much engineering gives you good "terror skills" (although there's something to be said for that argument), but points more toward the notion of the generally conservative engineer, or at least one that doesn't take too holistic a view of the world, thus making them ripe for all sorts of fundamentalist thought be it Islamic or Christian.


Frankly I think the neo-cons and Jihadists are just "brothers from another mother" to a certain degree. Fundies are fundies no matter what they believe... it's just they think they have an inside-scoop on how things ought to be, everybody else is wrong, and the world needs to be corrected to fit their views.

There's another book on the subject of networking... Nexus: The science of Small Worlds.... This book basically talks about the archetecture of efficiently connected networks and topics such as the "6-degrees of separation" phenomena. The easy explanation for the 6-degree problem (that we're all connected by about 6-degrees... you know somebody who knows somebody....). The simple answer is that networks that are randomly connected tend to have small degree separation. But in reality, most networks (social etc.) have an organizing principle (you tend to know more people in your area or interest group than totally random people). Any attempt to mathematically model a network with an organizing principle quickly reveals that there are many points with huge numbers of degrees between them. As it turns out that introducing just a small number of random points (small enough so that the network is still statistically ordered by the principle and not considered "random" overall) all of a sudden shrinks the number of degrees. What's cool about this is that examples of such networks turn up in brains, swarms of lightning bugs that synch. their flashes... etc. I'm sure that we are reaching a tipping point in the science of tipping points!