I read the God Delusion 12 years ago and was let down by it, and skipped this book for a long time, but WOW. I loved this book, and it was the best book I read this year, and one of the best in the past 5 (although in fairness, 90% of books I read are tech skill books, so...)

I might recommend the following along with the associated free textbook: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Flagunita.stanford.edu%2F... Textbook: http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth... Afterwards you can look at the more advanced free textbook: http://statweb.stanford.edu/~t...

One CPU cycle as one second might be a good metaphor for computer memory but not AI. It's closer to the equivalent of a neuron firing in the human brain, then it is to 1 second of human time. Human speech takes more than one neuron to fire, and it would take way more than one CPU cycle to process. An AI algorithm which is processing data, and analyzing it would literally take millions or billions of cycles most likely to do the most basic things. While no doubt speech recognition has gotten much faster, it is still and probably will always be a massive undertaking for a CPU to do, as opposed to say adding two 32-bit integers.

Yes this book (the 2nd Edition) is indeed something everyone should read. As is The Pragmatic Programmer, Gang of Four Design Patterns ( but initially I found it a bit terse, so Head First Design Pattern was a good initial grounding for OO), as well as whatever seminal books there are for your language of choice. For instance Effective C++ or Effective Java.

While I can see the allure of being very responsive to voters, this seems to be a potentially dangerous idea. By being very receptive to voters immediate desires, voters who by and large are not informed enough to make good decisions, it seems like we could very easily be stuck in both political standstill or trap where required actions could not be taken. If the logic end of your idea is that more candidates should be doing this, it seems we could very quickly become paralyzed.

I did something like this for a first year project, it involved charged particles which obeys a similar inverse square as gravity does for determining position. You basically had a fixed set of charges, that users could toggle to be between {-8,-4,-2,-1,0,1,2,4,8} * K, then you'd hit start and you'd try to get the puck to go to the goal (It was very much based on this: http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/electric-hockey). It involved basically looking at F_x (the force applied in the x direction, from every other point). F_y (the force applied in the y direction, from every other point). When you sum these up you get an instantaneous picture of the scene, that is you know it's position, and you know the forces acting upon it. Then I believe I used a technique called Runge-Kutta which gets me a prediction, of where it would be in a small time slice, (say 1/20th of a second), so I moved the particle there and repeat (This was all done in Java AWT I believe). All in all it was fairly straight forward, and gave the user the experience I think you are looking for.

Most things allow you to keep your settings while removing the rest of the application. There is a big difference between left over Registry entries not being removed, and merely hiding IE. While I suspect they are closer to the hiding IE side of things, I think the proof they offer is silly.