Comment by Sukotto
16 years ago
Les Earnest's anecdotes have been a real inspiration for me over the years. His Japanese Spy story is pretty good. But if you want a real laugh, read his Mongrel Race stories: http://yarchive.net/risks/mongrel.html
16 years ago
Les Earnest's anecdotes have been a real inspiration for me over the years. His Japanese Spy story is pretty good. But if you want a real laugh, read his Mongrel Race stories: http://yarchive.net/risks/mongrel.html
Also well worth reading is his "My analog to digital conversion" (http://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/digital.pdf), which despite its title is actually a bildungsroman about some terrifying engineering errors in 1950s military technology.
NOT the best way to vouch for someone: "'Yes, we just celebrated Guy Fawkes Day together.'"
Note also the author is an example of "oh, that's easy" WRT to the programming required to fix the real problem. I can well believe it was worth their while trying to get him to change his official race instead of trying to modify a program when no one on their IT staff was familiar with it and he was the only exception (so far).
Note WRT to Linus Pauling, a) he was indeed an inspiring chemist (his books are still very useful) and is considered to be the best of the 20th century. b) He was also willing Communist/Soviet tool.