🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2818@udenva.UUCP> agranok@udenva.UUCP (Alex B. Granok) writes:

>I really enjoyed the PBS series, and I enjoyed the "Connections" series as
>well. . . . What do you folks out there in computer land think about James 
>Burke's presentation of science in general?

I saw "Connections" when it was first on, and was at the time very impressed.
Since then, I've matured somewhat.  I think that he makes a valid and 
interesting point in "Connections", namely, that change is not always the
step-by-step orderly process that we often think it is, and that important
advances can come from seemingly unrelated things.  On the other hand, in order
to make his point he tends to oversimplify and even "fudge" things just a 
little.  He's not lying, mind you, but. . . well, take this example.  In one
essay, he argues that moveable type printing arose in part to the shortage
of clerks after the Black Death.  But moveable type wasn't invented for a
century after the Black Death!  What did people do for clerks in the 
intervening hundred-odd years?  And surely the population of Europe would
have been beginning to rebound in a century.  So, while James Burke is 
entertaining and interesting, what he says should not necessarily taken as
gospel.

					Richard Schultz

>                              "Wait a minute.  Strike that.  Reverse it."

				"We are the music-makers, and we are the 
				dreamers of the dream."