People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all. - Ellen Ullman

Over the years, as I listened to the engineering give-and-take over the question of artificial life-forms, I kept coming up against something obdurate inside myself, some stubborn resistance to the definition of “life” that was being promulgated. It seemed to me too reductive of what we are, too mechanistic. Even if I could not quite get myself to believe in God or the soul or the Tao or some other metaphor for the ineffable spark of life, still, as I sat there high in the balcony of the Stanford lecture hall, listening to the cyberneticists’ claims to be on the path toward the creation of a sentient being, I found myself muttering, No, that’s not right, we’re not just mechanisms, you’re missing something, there’s something else, something more. But then I had to ask myself: What else could there be?

I've been told that women have trouble as engineers because we'd rather relate to people than to machines.

Quite the contrary, it was an act of disdain for the complicated interchange known as conversation: for its vagaries, lost and meandering trails, half-understandings, and mysterious clarities. For the meaning of a pun is clear, all too clear. It demands a leap in understanding, to the exact place the punner demands.