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Yes, but humans are--to use a programmer's term--more object oriented than procedural. If you came to me with your hair on fire and asked me what the square root of sixteen was, I wouldn't say "four". I'd say, "HELP!" A program to this day would identify your question as the issue at hand.

Oh yes, your deeds are important. Hence judgment. But people are "unwanted pregnancies" or "invalids" or "handicapped" or "too old" and in many societies these are treated as disposable humanity. Think Scrooge saying, "If they'd rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus...

Put two and two together. The lost boys and the real life orphanage and hospital for foundlings.

An existentialist (I realize there are more than one flavour) usually believes things simply ARE, and they have value by what they DO. That brings to mind the old trope going around the internet when a flight attendant giving a safety briefing asked you to put the oxygen mask on yourself first...

I'm old enough to have watched them on analog TV when they first came out. There are advantages to older age...the way my lower back feels is not one of them.

Only the lucky ones.

The Alternative Factor, TOS season 1 episode 27.

You would have to be a techno-nerd with a fascination for discrete versus continuous speech, and advanced parsing techniques like paralinguistics. Consider if you were an android and I said, "I didn't say you stole the money". 1 **I** didn't say you stole the money. 2 I **DIDN'T** say you...

Now that's more balanced and nuanced, Shasta. I am at heart an essentialist, not an existentialist.

Or, as one episode of Star Trek opined, a safety valve. ;-)

A whole host of it. Especially if you've chatted with Alexa in the last year or so.

Shasta, there are three ages of man. Believing in fantasies, Believing only in realities, and Realizing that all reality was originally God's fantasy. Which is to say never throw away the childlike with the childish. Always keep that sense of wonder. The older I get, the more I realize how much...

Ah, a thoughtful remark indeed. However I don't believe alternate realities form ex nilho without a creator. I suppose the best argument for other realities is the common sense outrage you'd feel if someone asked you why you NEEDED to have a second child if you already had ONE. Or why you NEED a...

So that, like Project Apollo, you can visit other worlds and end with a splashdown? ;-) I once thought it would be interesting to say that every century or so it actually rains in the world between the woods, and if the water gets deep enough some of the ponds temporarily merge.

I'm wondering if Rob has ever considered using the voice dictation feature in a word processing program like Word. When I can touchtype, I can run circles around having to go in and do spell check here and there, but it's MUCH faster and less stressful than one handed typing. Just be sure to...

I usually let my characters speak for me. It was fun to write directly to my audience, and I'll be sure to do it again sometime. Pax vobiscum John +

My house is littered with dozens of unwanted paintings of ships at sea. None of them worked.... I also have a large slightly-used wardrobe I'll give away, with the caveat that it's only good for storing fur coats (included).

Actually not a close equivalent to "The Visitor." This story was actually begun about 21 years ago and I didn't know how to properly resolve it. I had a separate fascination with what happens to people who go into a coma (The Visitor) and people who are interlocking (Topsy Turvy) and any...

Personally I wonder why they call it a "joystick" when it's so FRUSTRATING. ;-) Same thing about a "controller" when I can't control one. ;-)

I like the Magician's Nephew because it hints at a vast tree of separate realities. Sometimes people have this knee-jerk reaction and ask why God would need to make more than one creation. That's when I nod and wink and say, "He didn't need YOUR creation, but aren't you glad He did it anyhow?"