News You Can Bruise for 2000 June 14

I just realized something interesting. When I write text for my CS classes (not a common occurance), I assign hypothetical people the ambiguous gender of "him or her". When I write text for philosophy classes (a common occurance), I assume that all hypothetical people are female. I think that this reflects the practices of my CS professors vs. my philosophy professors.

I prefer to assume that all hypothetical people are of a particular gender. I don't care which. It just makes the grammar easier to deal with. If there are multiple hypothetical people I'd like to give them names and refer to them by name, which I could do in CS (there being a precedent in the zany antics of Alice and Bob) but not in philosophy. Fortunately, in philosophy, the hypothetical people generally hail from different camps of philosophy so I can refer to them by the position they are advocating.

The CS130 final says I have to either hand-write it or use my favorite word processor. I wrote it in Emacs, but is it cheating to put it into Word format to print it out?

Only one man now stands between me and graduation... Ludwig Wittgenstein!