| And You Thought You Had a Bad Day |
Humorous filler piece in the form of a letter to an insurance company elaborating on the cause of a construction worker’s accident. The narrator’s attempt to lower 500 lbs of materials from a six-story roof using a pulley and barrel results in a cascade of injuries — fractured skull, broken collarbone, fractured ankles, cracked vertebrae |
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| GIGO: The Meeting |
Meeting notes covering the club treasurer’s financial report, plans for modem classes at the November meeting, ongoing orders for SMUG commemorative cups, and an observation that meeting attendance has been declining. |
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| Presidents Program |
Brief update noting that three SMUG members (including the president) have purchased IBM clones but continue using their Sinclair computers alongside them. Lists upcoming computer events: Serb Hall computer show November 10 ($4 at door) and Waukesha County Expo January 12 ($3). |
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| SMUG Bytes Goes Bimonthly |
Announcement that SMUG Bytes will shift from monthly to bimonthly publication, combining two months per issue. Two reasons are given: the shrinking Sinclair community no longer generates enough content to fill a monthly newsletter, and the editor has been producing the monthly since September 1984 and is fatigued. Notes that other Sinclair newsletters have made |
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| The Limits of Computer Intelligence II |
Second installment. Presents Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment — a human following an algorithm with Chinese symbol baskets never learns Chinese — and extends it to a ‘nonsense symbol room’ to show the computer’s additional disadvantage: no ability to even recognize symbol type. Dismisses Churchland’s electromagnetic ‘light room’ counterargument. Examines Proposition 3 (syntax alone cannot |
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