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1986 Oct 3
	Carolyn gave Timothy some chicken broth, saying, as mothers will,
"mmm good".  This suggests cookies with tiny edible microcircuits
that when the eater takes a bite, say "mmm good" and "congratulations
for choosing Nabisco Oreos".

1986 Oct 20
	AI journal, 1986 Oct, Levesque - Making Believers out of Computers -
writes of "vivid knowledge".  Is there an AI example, where what
form of knowledge is vivid depends on application?  Fourier transform,
waves and particles.  What about an accounting example?

1986 Oct 20
	Letter from Joseph Shea of NRC asking about ideas for space
research.  It seems that NASA's biggest problem with the Shuttle
is the excessive cost of turning it around for another flight.  What
research could help with this?

1986 Nov 17
Automating remedial mathematics
If our standard of living is to continue to improve, we must somehow
succeed in improving the productivity of white collar work.  In
teaching remedial mathematics, we have an activity whose practitioners,
namely mathematicians, would dearly like to work themselves out of a
job.  They would benefit, because if the remedial math weren't such
a necessity, the schools would probably lighten the teach loads of
mathematicians instead of hiring fewer.  Mathematical research, which
the mathematicians prefer to do and are qualified to do, is a high
prestige activity both for the mathematician and his school.  Moreover,
the mathematicians are qualified to apply ingenuity to working themselves
out of a job.  All this was suggested by an article
``Successful remedial mathematics programs and why they work'' by Dena
Patterson, Group in Science and Mathematics Education, UC Berkeley,
CA 94720 and Tom Sallee, Department of Mathematics, UC, Davis, 95616.
The article was in the American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 93, No. 9,
November 1986.

Now all we need is an idea.
They cite the need for a dedicated hard-working faculty member at the helm.
Let's try to do without that, or perhaps work it out so that one can
serve many universities.  Being such a dedicated hard-working faculty
member is not very rewarding and there may not be enough takers even
with the increased rewards the authors advocate.  Perhaps a dedicated
hard-working administrator without great mathematical background will
do but it would be even better to remove the need for dedication.  Of
course, it may be that the reference to dedication is a euphemism for
being willing to do it at all. 

Nov 26
Epidemiology of memes

Dec 14
On reading Boyer's history of calculus, I was inclined to disagree
with his remark that it is useless to put old ideas into modern
notation.  It can certainly be misleading, because advances that
are apparent in modern notation are obscure in the older notations.
Nevertheless, if we use modern formulas, but identify restricted
classes of formulas that correspond to old usage, we can perhaps
understand better their limitations.  The fact that it took more
than 2,000 years to develop the moderen concept of the
real number system and that this history is reasonably well
documented is a treasure house of data for the theory of heuristic.
We may learn something useful for AI in contemplating it.