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[ewx]

Incredibly late answers to questions from j4:

1. You can ask the all-knowing Oracle three questions about your future (no asking for winning lottery numbers!) -- what do you ask?

I initially thought I'd go for fairly vague questions; I think I mentioned in answers to someone else that I'd prefer not to know the date of my own death, for instance. Similarly I wouldn't want to discover that I was going to be living in London in ten years time: I'd spend the following decade wondering what was going to take me there.

But I couldn't think of anything at all and left the question for ages...

I think right now I'd like to know if I'm going to have children, and approximately when. It's not something I plan on in the immediate future - but will I continue to feel that way forever? The point being that if I'm going to then it wouldn't hurt to plan for it now: we'd need a bigger house sooner or later, financial security would become more important, etc.

I'd also like to have some idea I'm going to stay in the same career. Will I be a software developer until I retire, or is there a shift to something completely different in the pipeline? Thie one isn't a planning thing; just a matter of interest.

Having said I wouldn't want to know the date of my own death, actually, it might be better to know if I was going to die (or be seriously and permanently disabled) in, say, the next ten years; knowing something like that too far in the future would just be morbid and depressing but if it's going to happen in the relatively near future I think I'd like to know about it and - hopefuly - pack as much into life before then as possible.

2. If you could change history so that Hitler had never existed, but doing so would also mean that Einstein had never existed, would you do it?

On balance, probably not. Even without Nazi control of Germany, there'd still have been Italy, Japan and the USSR to worry about - and even without Hitler, there's no guarantee that the Nazis wouldn't have nonetheless managed to seize power in Germany; Hitler came to power not just through effective rhetoric but because economic disaster left Germans more willing to follow extremists. So, I don't think that eliminating Hitler would reliably do enough good to justify taking Einstein with him.

3. If you had to do a job which didn't directly involve computers at all, what would you do? (Assume you can retrain as necessary, if you like.)

I'd like it to be something with a clear product - so writing, or making some kind of thing (perhaps involving wood?), though not in a mass-production sense, in either case.

4. You have control of a pirate radio station for a day. What do you broadcast?

I think it'd depend on the audience, and realistically with a pirate radio station and only a day in which to get people's attention it's going to be a pretty small one. Which tempts me not to bother doing anything significant but instead just play random bits of music from my collection. A better thing might be to go for a day of weird and unusual music - enormous.mp3, Richard Cheese, etc./p>

5. What do you think would be the best thing(s) about having tentacles? :-)

I'm sure it'd get the girls... Hopefuly human ones.

I'm constantly finding my hands are full of more things than is convenient - so the first one that comes to mind is simply being able to carry more different things than at present. I suspect there'd be lots of little convenient things like that.

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My impression is also that SR was going to happen anyway. Given the way that so many things seem to get invented or discovered multiple times more or less concurrently I can't help feeling that his other discoveries would have turned up under other hands not so long after he in fact made them, too.

Perhaps slightly more intriguingly though ISTR that he was involved in convincing FDR to start the Manhattan Project; could the absence of the individual have had more effect there? Perhaps his influence has been over-estimated though; other governments of the era had nuclear programmes too, so perhaps that too would have been sure to happen anyway.