From: "Nigel Price" 
Subject: (urth) Mr Million v Oreb
Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 21:45:49 +0100

Apologies to hartshorn (no capital H, no terminal e). My friends the
Hartshornes do spell their name with a capital "H" and a terminal "e", and
that's probably why I wrote it that way. Sorry. Should have been
concentrating...

>>A cubic millimeter of brain has 14 kilometers
>>of biological wiring packed into it.   There
>is no comparion between the brain of any living
>>creature and ANY contemporary computer.

A splendidly precise answer to my inane speculations.

Maybe the difference between Mr Million's implementation of a stored human
personality and Oreb's, then, (apart from the obvious one that they appear
in different books, written at different times, when the author may have had
more or less experience of computer and/or completely different artistic
intentions!) arises from the fact that Oreb's bird brain is already stuffed
full to capacity with night chough subroutines (datatypes? function calls?),
leaving relatively little room to spare for downloaded cyber-deities.
Perhaps loading Scylla into Oreb is like installing two operating systems
and a double boot option onto your PC. There was plenty of space when you
were running just one OS, but it gets a bit crowded when you've got two.

Or then again, Oreb's characteristic speech pattern may be the result of
some sort of "bottleneck" in the capacity of Oreb's speech centres.

Or maybe it just made him interesting and distinctive as a character.

>>I won't comment on the Pharasees/Saducsees debate

I mentioned it once, but I think that I got away with it...

Nigel (no lowercase "W", no terminal "z")


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