Interconnectedness of all things, redux.

I Find Karma (adam@milliways.cs.caltech.edu)
Tue, 29 Jul 1997 15:00:53 -0700 (PDT)


I recently read Douglas Adam's _Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency_
and discovered that, in fact, the following blockquote does not appear
anywhere in the text:

We Believe in the Interconnectedness of All Things.

Therefore, from now on, we should all attribute this sentence to Dan
Connolly instead of Douglas Adams. For the record, the Douglas Adams
line is on page 144 of the book:

What we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness
of all things.

Close, but no cigar. Sort of like "Come up and see me some time." being
attributed to Mae West when in fact the closest she ever got to saying
that is "Why don't you come and see me?" Or like "Billions and billions"
being attributed to Carl Sagan when in fact Johnny Carson was the one
who invented the saying in a parody of Sagan's _Cosmos_.

You might be thinking that the interconnectedness line is in fact the
slogan for the Holistic Detective Agency, but as we see on page 140, it
is not. Rather, the slogan is:

We solve the *whole* crime.
We find the *whole* person.
Phone today for the *whole* solution to your problem.
(Missing cats and messy divorces a speciality.)

I'll close with my favorite line from the book, on page 145.

I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in
the pattern and web of the whole.

----
adam@cs.caltech.edu

Nearly all of the consequences of the widespread adoption of Java are
pretty scary if you think too hard about them. People who know nothing
about distribution are building distributed systems. People who know
nothing about concurrency are building concurrent programs. People who
know nothing about OO frameworks are building GUIs.
-- Doug Lea