1 comments about It's A Long Way From Llano: The Journey of a Wildlife Biologist.

1. This is one monumental book, in that the author weaves together his personal experiences from notes he kept in a journal, along with a fictional novel that he constructed from those events, during his tour. He also flashes backwards and forwards with his life before Vietnam and then returning on rice business much later. In so doing, he develops the very story we all went through as young men in college in the early to mid-sixties, who did not mind a military obligation or the hardships of deployment to SE Asia, and served well. (This is three books in one.)
   I was a helicopter pilot with the 175th Outlaws and know the Vi Thanh area well. IT was a very hostile province, and the VC owned it and all the territory to Rach Gia and the U Minh Forest. Tom Hargrove describes life with the MACV teams very specifically, and superbly addresses their thoughts and intentions while living so sparsely. The dangers of interactions with the local VN are so typical; it is a wonder we all survived our valiant attempts at pacification.
   
   This necessary book covers the Advisor side of the war, which was much more commonplace than the conventional war, being waged "Up North" with the American divisions. For those of you who want to read about this realistic Vietnam conflict in the hinterlands, read this book of outpost living and agrarian assistance to these poor rice paddy farmers. Way to go, Tom!! It was always nice to climb back into our Huey and return to Vinh Long after resupplying you guys! A lot of truth here, and maybe it has taken all these years to get it out--the way we lived our war in the Delta...

5 comments about Signor Marconi's Magic Box: The Most Remarkable Invention Of The 19th Century & The Amateur Inventor Whose Genius Sparked A Revolution.

1. This is a great Biography of Marconi, who is the father of radio. I never read Marconi's story before - it was well worth the wait - the author did a fantastic job with Mr. Marconi's life and his adventures with wireless radio.



2. Surprised that the book fails on a major point: to talk about the highly supportable contention that Marconi stole Tesla's technological ideas, since Marconi visited Tesla and since Tesla was such a "businessman innocent" that he let people root around in his papers for ideas as a friendship gesture.
   
   Still, an intersting read on the early 20th century through various technological vingnettes about the effects of radio that you would find no where else--until a better book is published of course, in my opinion.



3. This book, at 291 pages, is a quick read. It can be read in about two hours. We learn that Marconi's main contribution was to combine Heinrich Hertz's invention of radio waves with Oliver Lodge's invention of the coherer. We learn of Marconi's discovery of radio waves bouncing off the upper atmosphere, an effect essential for trans-Atlantic radio waves (paves 53-55, 258). We learn of Marconi's "spark method" which worked better than Edison's jumping current method. We learn that it was actually David Hughes (pages 97-98) and Oliver Heaviside (pages 128-131), not Marconi, who built the first wireless. We also learn that Nathan Stubblefield was the inventor of a wireless that could transmit not just Morse code, but also voices and music.
   
   Much of the book tells about Marconi's efforts at building higher aerials and scouting out locations to build aerials, e.g., on various ships, in Cape Cod, Newfoundland, or Santa Catalina Island. In fact, this is the major thrust of the book: scouting out locations for building aerials. The book should not have been called "Signor Marconi's Magic Box," since we learn nothing about the "spark method" or the "coherer" beyond their names. Instead, the book should have been called "Signor Marconi Builder of Aerials." The word "patent" occurs 19 times in the book, but here the word patent is just used in passing, and we learn nothing about the patents, or how they represented improvements over the earlier state of the radio art. "Patent" does not even occur in the index.
   
   The book spends a good deal of time utilizing literary devices, especially the literary device of describing the weather, and the literary device of naming personalities with little or no direct relevance to Marconi. For example, we are told that "on a misty morning three days later a Russian hospital ship sighted another vessel" (page 200). We learn that "the men who were working ran out into the snow in mad rejoicing" (page 146). We find that "day after day through the hot summer months of 1895 . . ."(page 16). We are told that "tens of thousands of chimneys filled the air with the sooty haze" (page 21). We read that "this was a deeply romantic corner of England, a treacherous rocky coast. . . where people still talked of lost bounties of wrecked . . . Spanish galleons" (page 72). We also read that "outside, his men braved the icy winds which blew small icebergs into Glace Bay" (page 100). Moreover, we learn about "out on the snowy wastes of Brant Rock . . ." (page 208). Additionally, we read that "in the summer heat the stony earth shimmers" (page 281) and that "a storm blew up from the northwest" (page 264). The author is a confirmed name-dropper. We learn the names of Marconi's competitors, and the names of Marconi's love interests, literary figures, sports figures, and political figures of the time (e.g., King Victor Emmanuel; Reginald Fessenden; Nevil Maskelyne; Frank Fayant; Alexander Popov; Gordon Bennett; Eugene Ducretet; Inez Milholland; Thomas Lipton; Lionel James; Rossini; Chopin; Arthur Conan Doyle; Frederick Treves; Amos Dolbear; Alaxandre Dumas; Nellie Melba; Beatrice O'Brien; Edmund Gurney; Frederic Myers; Leonore Piper; George Bernard Shaw; Joseph Pulitzer; and Cristina Bezza-Scali; Rudyard Kipling; Bob Fitzsimmons; Jim Jeffries; Jack Dempsey; Henry McClure; just to name a few). On and on and on goes the list of irrelevant names. The book devotes atleast ten times more space describing Marconi's romantic interests than describing the engineers who work for Marconi.
   
   To conclude, the author Gavin Weightman provides us with a book having a misleading title (Signor Marconi's Magic Box) and a misleading subtitle (The Most Remarkable Invention of the 19th Century). The book contains only a moderate amount of interesting material, but a huge amount of fluff. The book does not explain the nature of a coherer, a Herzian wave, or the spark method, and reveals very little about Marconi's collaborators and coworkers, essentially nothing about Marconi's business partners, and essentially nothing about what Marconi had actually invented. In striking contrast is Tom Lewis' book Empire of the Air. Tom Lewis covers the history of radio with the insight expected of somebody who is an electrical engineer having a J.D. and an M.B.A. Five stars to Tom Lewis' book Empire of the Air.



4. From the title, you might suppose this book to be a history of early wireless, with an emphasis on Marconi's work. And so it is, to some degree. It is much more a biography of Marconi, for whom Weightman has an evident fondness. But it is a weak biography, in that it does not delve into Marconi's life too deeply, or too long. Indeed, the book effectively ends (or rather, just stops) at the First World War, with a final chapter or two about the last years of Marconi's life 20 years later. And it's a somewhat incomplete story of early wireless, concentrating (understandably) mostly on Marconi's work, with only glimpses of the advances made by so many other pioneers. Still, it is an interesting and informative read, fleshing out the bare bones of the earliest years of an emerging technology. It just left me wondering what happened to the second half of the book.



5. The story of the development of wireless technology is complicated and surrounded by claim and counter claim. Marconi is undoubtedly the central figure of this story but the main characters are interwoven like the twisted pair wires that were replaced by the increasing use of telegraph communications.

   Einstein has said that scientific advance is opaque with foresight, transparent with hindsight, and this book amply illustrates the point. It is easy to look back on the breakthroughs of Guiglielmo Marconi and belittle the impact. Yet much of the enormous advances at the end of the 20th century would not have been possible without Marconi (or rather the technology STARTED by Marconi's discoveries). Marconi was a strange mixture of modern and ancient, and did not understand the theoretical background of his advances. Nor does the reader need to understand the science of signal transmission to thoroughly enjoy the book. It is interesting and enlightening to see the attempts to rationalise how `radio' worked, particularly by some of his contemporaries. I suspect that some of our own imperfect understandings will be viewed with similar wonder when viewed from the other side of lucid explanations.

   The story is generally well told, and is particularly effective when describing three Atlantic dramas in the years just before the First World War. The passengers rescued from the steam ships Republic and Titanic owed their rescue to both the technology, and to the seriously dedicated wireless operators. Indeed, the operators from the Titanic only ceased transmitting about 20 minutes before the vessel went down, and one of the pair perished. In the third drama, Dr Crippen was apprehended in New York after `escaping' on a trans-Atlantic voyage - the ship's captain recognised the man who had murdered his wife, and the `Marconi men' on board informed the authorities. Both English and French newspapers published the `chase', charting the positions of both Crippen's vessel, and that of the following Inspector Drew (in a faster vessel, which arrived first in New York).

   Marconi's advances shine through the pages of the book, but even though it is not dwelt upon, Marconi as a man receives very much less favourable coverage. I suppose if he had been a `better' person, he would not have made the breakthroughs of which we are all grateful.

   Peter Morgan (morganp@supanet.com)

1 comments about John Logie Baird: A Life.

1. The authors draw on unpublished and, in some cases, hitherto unknown material to present a comprehensive new account of the life of this enigmatic and controversial Scottish genius.

   In January 1926 Baird was the first publicly to demonstrate real television. Other pioneering achievements followed, including the first transatlantic transmission, the first demonstrations of colour television and stereoscopic television, and the first video recordings. In the 1930s he twice televised the Derby, and was the first to demonstrate television technology in the cinema in both black-and-white and colour. During World War II he developed high-definition and stereoscopic television in colour, and invented the first all-electronic colour television tube. He also made significant advances in radio imaging, secret signalling, fibre optics, infra-red scanning, and fast facsimilie transmission.

   Throughout his life he struggled with ill health and lack of funding, to the extent that he paid for his initial research efforts and his final, heroic, and perhaps most startling, developments out of his own pocket.

   This balanced, thoroughly documented and splendidly readable account throws new light not only on Baird himself, but on many of those associated with him. Truth is separated from legend, and the facts are uncovered behind Baird's auto-biographical memoir, published in 1988 as Sermons, Soap and Television, the text of which can now be compared with a recently discovered manuscript containing his own corrections.

   Fresh information is revealed about the 'lost' years in London and Hastings in the early 1920s, which includes for the first time details of the company Baird established to sell soap, his unconventional romance, and the Falkirk connection.

   Special treatment is given to Baird's troubled relationship with the BBC, and in particular to the role played by the corporation's director general, Sir John Reith. There is a full account of Baird's brave efforts to establish a presence in the USA. Also disclosed is the background to the boardroom coup which resulted in Baird being relieved of his duties as managing director of the company which he had founded.

   In the light of their review of existing sources and examination of fresh evidence, the authors reach several conclusions which modify or challenge received opinion. Much of the documentation of from family and other archives, including Baird's wartime letters to his friend Sydney Moseley, extracts from the private diaries of Eustace Robb (the BBC's first television producer), company memos and reports of the early 1930s, and many of the sixty photographs, has never before been published.

1 comments about The Black Digital Elite: African American Leaders of the Information Revolution.

1. John T. Barber profiles "26 outstanding African American cyberelites." Black Digital Elite is divided into six parts, each of which addresses a different aspect of what he calls the Information Revolution.
   
   Part I: Scientists and Innovator, introduces four visionaries whose work with computers revolutionized the way we use computers and the internet. Part II: Policy Makers and Power Brokers presents eight forward thinkers who developed plans, policies and programs that made access to new technologies in computing and communication easier for African Americans. Part III: Educators and Professionals features three people in academia who have taught and encouraged African American students to pursue degrees and careers in high tech industries. Part IV: Cybercommunity Developers discusses three Information Technology (IT) professionals who have focused on digital access and computer literacy in the African American community. Part V: Masters of the World Wide Web examines four masters of the internet who have created web sites and web portals geared towards African Americans. Part VI: Chief Executive Officers, Entrepreneurs and Big Money Makers, profiles four leaders in Corporate America who are using their money and businesses to introduce and/or upgrade communication and computer technologies in the African American community and under-served communities around the world.
   
   This was a very informative read. I was unaware of the number of prominent African Americans who have been on the leading edge of the Information Revolution, inventors, educators, politicians, and business leaders who have worked tirelessly to bridge the digital gap that exists between the African American community and the rest of the world. As an IT professional, I am thrilled to learn of the accomplishments of my elders and contemporaries in the high tech arena. I encourage young people to use this book as both a reference book for writing about innovative elders and as a career planning manual.

No comments about The Dilemmas of An Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman for German Science.

2 comments about The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius.

1. THE FIRST SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND THE PURSUIT OF GENIUS comes from a history professor at Harvard, who shows how Franklin's evolving status as a scientific genius lends to appreciating his works and the evolution of science as a whole. There have been many biographies of Franklin over the years; but this is the first to narrow the focus on his scientific investigations and how they led to his political prominence. All of his scientific research is considered, linking science works with problem-solving at the social and political levels. New research into documents from his early career and those of his colleagues lend to a unique discussion here.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch



2. Let me start by saying up front that it pains me to give this book a low rating, because I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Thanks for that, however, go to Mr. Franklin, not Ms. Chaplin. Franklin was a fascinating figure with an interesting life, and it would be difficult to write an uninteresting book about him. This book, however, is rather poorly written and at times gives the impression of trying to stretch a little information a bit too far. To me, it felt as though she decided to write a book on Franklin the scientist, found she didn't quite have enough science material to fill a book, and decided to stretch it with repetitive, somewhat pretentious interpretation which added little too the book besides pages. At points I felt as though she was trying a little too hard to keep the book from becoming a biography of Franklin, staying completely focused on the science aspect when a little information on his life in general was need to place the science in context. The writing was frequently a little clunky and tiresome.
   
   Overall, worth reading, at least if you have a specific interest in the subject, but not worth buying in hardcover.

2 comments about David Suzuki: The Autobiography.

1. I thoroughly enjoyed this tracing of David Suziki's life from his early encounters with racism through his life-long efforts to inform others of the need to safeguard the Earth's resources and his role to do something about it. This is indeed the story from the one who lived it of a great scientist and environmentalist. Highly recommended.



2. +++++
   
   "Why would anyone else be interested in my life? I know people like to delve into the hidden parts of the lives of people who have acquired some notoriety, hoping to find juicy bits of gossip, signs of weakness or faults that bring the subjects down off pedestals, or simply to expand on what one knows about a public figure. It's not my intension to satisfy that curiosity. Instead, as an "elder," I hope my reflection on one life may stir the reader to consider those thoughts in relation to his or her own life."
   
   The above is found in the last paragraph of the preface of this book by geneticist and environmentalist, the TV host of the acclaimed long-running program "The Nature of Things with David Suzuki," the founder and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, and the author of more than forty books, David Suzuki (born 1936).
   
   Suzuki explains the contents of his candid and honest book:
   
   "This...is a story I have created by selectively dredging up bits and pieces from the detritus of seventy years of life. The first five chapters skim over the first fifty years...and the rest of the book describes events since then."
   
   More specifically, the first five chapters begin with his childhood life in "racist British Columbia" in Canada, then goes on to his education in the U.S., his early career as a research geneticist, and his "new career" in radio then television. As the book proceeds, we see his transformation into environmental warrior where he recounts stories of his activism in British Columbia and eventually the Amazon, telling us of the plight of the indigenous peoples in this environmentally sensitive region.
   
   In the second half of his book, he tells of his journeys to Australia. Suzuki fell "head over heels" for this country and says that "We [his second wife and him] have never regretted remaining in Canada, but we do feel privileged to be able to return to Australia again and again." He goes on to explain the establishment of the foundation named after him and describes some of its successes to date. Then he proceeds to tell us of his experiences at the Earth summit of 1992 and the world climate change conference held in Kyoto, Japan in 1997.
   
   The last three chapters are especially interesting where Suzuki gives us his ruminations on science and technology, the cult of celebrity and old age respectively.
   
   Throughout the book, two things are apparent: Suzuki cares deeply for his family and his passion for the environment. With regards to the latter, I thought I knew a lot about what's happening to the environment, but I learned much more from reading this book. I think I learned so much because of Suzuki's first-hand observations that he eloquently details and his explanations of what's going on are easy to understand. (My assertion here is actually incredible when you think about it because this book is actually an autobiography and not an environmental science book.)
   
   This autobiography is chatty, intimate, full of interesting stories, and remarkably honest. Suzuki's decency and sincerity shines through practically every sentence of his book.
   
   Finally, the book is peppered with photographs. Even though he sees the "cult of celebrity" as "frightening," you'll see Suzuki in photographs with Canadian and U.S. celebrities such as Gordon Lightfoot, John Denver, Tom Cruise, and Jane Fonda. My favorite photo is the very last one that has him posing naked with only a fig leaf on. The caption reads:
   
   "The notorious fig leaf shot for the show "Phallacies" for [his TV show] "The Nature of Things with David Suzuki."
   
   In conclusion, this is an elegant account of the life of a man who evolved from an academic geneticist into a T.V. and radio personality, first popular in Canada, then the world!!
   
   (first published 2006; preface; 18 chapters; main narrative 400 pages; index; photo credits)
   
   +++++

5 comments about Time Lord : Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time.

1. The book spends a lot more time talking about Fleming and things going on around the time of his life and less on the specific topic of the creation and adoption of standard time - definitely not what I expected given the title.



2. How could i possibly pass by such a title? As an avid fan of Doctor WHO, the original time lord, captured the eye firmly enough. But this is hardly a book of science fiction, although few novelists could adequately depict the subject. This book is the rendering of one of the 19th Century's most notable autodidacts. An almost penniless emigrant from rural Scotland, Sandford Fleming revolutionised the world's concept of time. In this fascinating, but rather disorganised, account, Blaise weaves numerous themes around Fleming's aim to make the world's time measurement coherent - and universal.
   
   The prompt for Fleming's quest was a missed train in Ireland well into the era of the Industrial Revolution. Driven by steam, that age first used that power to raise water from coal mines. Applied to transportation of goods and people, one of steam's legacies was changing the nature of time. Factory workers now laboured to the clock, and travel speed increased dramatically. Rail travel quickly overtook animal prowess, but also revolutionised our lives. In North America, the spread of the land led to rail companies becoming the index of industry, and a force in politics and society. Each rail company kept time according to its head office. Its schedules granted it dominion over time, leading to such anomalies as the city of St Louis, which observed six different railroad times. This, in addition to the common practice of each town marking its own time by the sun's overhead passage.
   
   Without question, Blaise' most eloquent chapter is "The Aesthetics of Time" in which he renders the influence of changing concepts on time on the arts, notably impressionism and literature. While the world was moving toward more uniform means of dealing with time, the arts recognised that the established "natural time" with its easy, regular flow - "time's arrow" - had been demolished. Readers and viewers came to accept disjointed time in stories and paintings. Blaise uses Cailllebotte's "Paris Street, Rainy Day", which was composed from a string of photographs, as the prime example. Nothing is still and the figures appear detached from "normal" concepts of time. In a similar manner, novelists could break up stories into disconnected parts, skipping about in the chronology to build new forms of narrative. Blaise' own narrative follows their pattern, forcing the reader to accept his irregular presentation. Given the quality of Blaise' insights and ability to discuss them, this book is half the size it might be.
   
   Fleming's missed train kept him apart from most of this social upheaval. A tightly focussed engineer, his aim was standard time around the planet. He understood the desire for a "prime meridian", but wanted a mechanism that would transcend national or commercial interests. He devised a complex scheme with a time centred within the Earth. It would have obsoleted every clock and pocket watch in existence, but had the advantage of universality. Ocean shippers also favoured a standard scheme, with nearly all ships using Greenwich, England as their temporal starting point. Resistance from nations who'd already established their own primes obstructed Fleming's project, which came to a head in Washington, D.C., in 1884. A prolonged, three-week negotiation ultimately led to the standard time zones we live within today. In Blaise's view, Fleming is justifiably renowned for his contribution to this achievement. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]



3. After he set out the initial scene and made narrative inroads, the author proceeded to regale us with his views on time and why they're important. These pseudo-science views could have all made a great short story but had no place interspersing with an actual narrative. It really screamed for a good editor to sit the poor man down and say "No."



4. Most of Time Lord should have been about Sir Sandford Fleming, about how he grew up, about why he left home (Scotland) and crossed the ocean to a new land (Canada), his trials and tribulations, the events of his life, great and small, that shaped this great but mostly forgotten man. Then after three or four hundred pages of this, an author can permit himself to give his personal views in a few pages.
   
   Instead of doing this, Clark Blaise reverses the precepts and gives us 200 pages of his Views on Time and how Deep the Concept is. He gives us a mishmash of poetry and literature and badly thought out espresso philosophy. Nothing about Fleming. I would have loved a day-by-day account of the Prime Meridian conference, or of Fleming's days as chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. No such luck.
   
   After finishing the book, I went to the shortish wikipedia entry on Fleming and found more facts there than in Blaise's book. Until someone writes a better book, that might be the best thing to do.
   
   Vincent Poirier, Tokyo



5. Although Time Lord weighs in at fewer than 250 pages, this book took me a great deal of time to read in part because it constantly put me to sleep. Usually the combination of history/biography/science is favorite of mine, and finding out where our notion of time originated sounded like a fascinating topic to me. In the end, however, the story just isn't that exciting and it felt like the author was padding the book with unrelated filler material.
   
   To be fair, Sir Sanford Fleming is an interesting and admirable character. Intelligent and hard working, he was a self-made man who emigrated from Scotland to North America to seek his fortunes. In addition to the creation of standard time, he was also largely responsible for the trans-Pacific cable and the trans-Canadian railway.
   
   While Fleming's accomplishments are all duly noted by the author, much of the book felt like filler material. Entire chapters are spent waxing philosophical about the "nature of time" and how various notions of time affected everything from art to literature. If you happen to have done postgraduate study in art or literature, you may genuinely enjoy these distractions, but I found them to be a bit too much. Blaise spends as much time (one chapter) discussing Sherlock Holmes as he does discussing the actual Prime Meridian Conference.
   
   Time Lord is not without its pleasures. It is truly fascinating to read how the world worked (or attempted to work) with an infinite number of local times, and how the advent of rail travel in particular created the need for time standardization. It was also interesting and, at times, amusing to study the role politics and national pride (particularly between the British and the French) played in the entire affair. Unfortunately such topics do not constitute the majority of the book, as they are what I was most looking for.
   
   If you or the person you are shopping for enjoy this genre, you might first want to consider The Measure of All Things (which chronicles the creation of the meter) or Pendulum (on the life of Leon Foucault), both of which I found to be more enjoyable reading than Time Lord.

2 comments about I, Cyborg.

1. Don't bother. This guy is a systems and process engineer, a robotics genius - and a megalomaniac who thinks he does real science. Surprise! He went to do his experiment and discovered that there are rules to real science, like Human Subjects Protection laws. This is a guy who thinks that if you feed each group of 10 schoolkids a different breakfast for a month and find a 3 point difference in IQ in the group that ate bacon sandwches, that proves that bacon raises IQ. He mixes up his psychological, biological and philosophical concepts, mostly because he really doesn't seem to have much grounding beyond the logic of systems - and his own desire to become the first cyborg. That huge book, and 95% is "me, I, me, I" about his papers, his trips, his projects, his jobs, his TV appearances, his publicity.
   
   The experiment isn't much. Big deal, he implanted a small array of electrodes in his lower arm with some wires attached, wore it around for 3 months, connected it to a computer once in a while, and then he ran some simple tests on it, the most important of which, in my estimation, was making the virtual hand work at a distance by moving his own hand - a nice future worth developing for robotics working in dangerous environments, something that didn't seem to have occured to him. The part about sending electrical currents from his hand to his wife's hand was interesting, but he imbued it with semi-mythical power. My question is, does it count as brain-to-brain electrical communication if the nerve stimulation doesn't pass through the brain but only works in the arm and spinal column, or just the arm to the implant? Issues he didn't consider because of his limited knowledge in anatomy, neuroanatomy (he had to open a textbook at every step of his experiment), etc.
   
   I think cyborgs are coming, and I think neural control of objects is a good thing. I want to be able to write and make art from my brain directly, when that is possible, and would even be willing to volunteer to help along the way. But I don't think Warwick counts as the first real cyborg. He wasn't even the first implant - the first and second implants were done in 1996 by a group in Atlanta, headed up by Philip Kennedy (Science News, 1/29/05, p. 73). I think Warwick's effort was an engineer-being-a-science-dilettante publicity-hound's quick-and-dirty effort to grab a lot of ink and a Nobel Prize, which he thought to deny in the book - why bother to mention it if you're not thinking about it?
   
   Read the news stories about his experiments, they get to the point faster. Read his books about robotics, which is where his expertise lies, if you're interested in his real work and significant ideas. Read other people's work on cyborgs. Check out the good work being done with blind people and paraplegics by different groups, work that goes into serious scientific looks at what Warwick just played with. They just don't write self-aggrandizing books about things, they go through peer review first!



2. I would have liked to hear more of this experiment. From the writer experience, it appears that a body can be directly linked to a computer to do simple tasks like driving a wheel chair.

   The possibiliy of directly linking a computer to a brain as quite an exciting possiblity. I also agreed with the writer that it could be quite a blessing to many people that are incapicitated in some way.

No comments about Melanie Klein (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism).