This Week at the Library (11 January)

Currently Reading: How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker; The Positronic Man, Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg; The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene (on hold until I finish How the Mind Works).


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"It's ridiculous, sir! Getting married."
"Women like it, Patrick."
"Why do they need us? Why don't they just do it and tell us afterwards. Christ!"

p. 313, Sharpe's Honour. Bernard Cornwell.

"Virtually nothing is known about the functioning microcircuity of the human brain, because there is a shortage of volunteers willing to give up their brains to science before they are dead."

p. 184, How the Mind Works. Steven Pinker. 

You are a robot, Andrew reminded himself sternly.
You are a product of the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation.
And then Andrew would look at Little Miss and a sensation of great joy and warmth would spread through his positronic brain -- a sensation that he had come to identify as 'love' -- and then he would have to remind himself, all over again, that he was nothing more than a cleverly designed structure of metal and plastic with an artificial platinum-iridium brain inside his chrome-steel skull, and he had no right to feel emotions, or to think paradoxical thoughts, or to do any other such complex and mysterious human being.

p. 51, The Positronic Man, Asimov and Silverberg.