Half an Hour

I was introduced to a thing called the 'internet' in a pub in Edmonton after a softball game in 1988 or so. We philosophy students had gathered there after losing another game and some of the others (Ishy and Jeff, to be specific) to me about a 'MUD' they had been playing on.  I took to it like a duck to water. I had already been messing around with online services, having set up a Maximus bulletin board service (BBS) on my own, and the MUD was just like the game 'Adventure', which I had played while working on a mainframe while on training in Austin, Texas, in 1980. I have no natural programming skills. It has always been a struggle for me; I blame my phonics-oriented education, which somehow managed to bypass the concepts of abstraction and formalization almost entirely. My inability to complete integral calculus doomed my plan to become a physicist, and it wasn't until I took an advanced philosophy of mathematics class with Verena Huber-Dyson that I compr...