Correspondence
To the Editor: I thought the "Great American Saloon" by Aram Bakshian, Jr. (April, 1974) was delightful. It really reflected the flavor of the bar and its customers. In fact, it was the best...
...Christopher O'Brien Yonkers, New York To the Editor: The Alternative has committed some remarkable blunders in its off-and-on (usually on) apologetics for the Nixon Administration, but Benjamin Stein's attempt to use Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Nixon's behalf (March 1974 issue) takes the cake...
...I hope Mr...
...I'd like to get copies if you have them...
...David A. Pietrusza Amsterdam, New York To the Editor: I am flattered by Professor Seifert's praise of Accuracy in Media's achievements (The Alternative, April, 1974...
...At Fordham, we have a rather large contingent of these intellectual cavaliers who ramble on, employing the worn-out slogans of the Dylan-Baez epoch...
...T.G...
...Looks like o1' Abe wasn't so "honest" after all, huh...
...It's a damn sight (dam site...
...I recently showed The Affernative to a liberal friend of mine and his response was "Who are these f...
...42, p. 230-65...
...They are accurate models of computers since several other abstract models proposed by others, such as Post and Markov, have been shown to be equivalent to luring Machines...
...59, p. 433-60...
...Alexander Martschenko Madison, Wisconsin To the Editor: The hysterically uncomplimentary book review of the college professor expos6, This Beats Working for a Living, turned in by Steven Finer becomes a bit more comprehensible when one turns to the contributors section...
...RET To the Editor: Congratulations to James Grant for his story on the Hotel Algonquin in the "Great American Saloon Series" (March issue...
...What gives you the idea something is wrong...
...You must really print more such humor...
...If an actual computer were programmed to behave in a manner which would cause a human questioner to mistake it for a human, then one could theoretically construct a mathematical model of such a computer...
...Unfortunately, today there is too little interest in the wit and wisdom of that fabulous crew (particularly Robert Benchley, who is today undeservedly little read...
...Tim Baer Pompano Beach, Florida To the Editor: The description of a Turing Machine given by Nell Howe in his review of Hugh Kenner's The Counterfeiters (May, 1974) is inaccurate...
...Carl Miller Indianapolis, Indiana To the Editor: Have you considered reprinting Undley Clark's series on the "Business of America...
...Surely that Hotel, its postagestamp size bar, and its two magnificent dining rooms are musts for anyone visiting New York...
...London Math...
...Where has Mr...
...In the interests of truth, however, I rate RET as the best of editors and the readers of The Alternative,, thanks to him, as the brightest and most knowledgeable...
...Finer is none other than an aspiring Professor Finer...
...The financial results of our appeals there for support ran from 1 to 30 percent of the cost of the ads...
...To the Editor: Just a note to congratulate you on your April 1974 issue...
...that, unlike those unspeakable politicians, America's "sellers" (read chain stores, distributors, conglomerates, agribusiness, the oil cartel) are forthright, wholesome, honest workmen doing their best against equally estimable competitors to win the flinty-eyed buyer's custom...
...These abstract machines can mimic the behavior of actual computers...
...Such a model was first proposed byTuring in 1936 in his paper "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheichunoss Problem" (Proc...
...It's such a refreshing change from all those depressingly serious pieces where people are trying to figure out what the bell's wrong...
...Such a machine does not exist...
...Here are the cold facts...
...It seems undoubtedly, by sheer coincidence--that the outraged Mr...
...The ad we placed in The Alternative netted THREE TIMES THE COST...
...That is the only leadership Nixon has given us...
...Stein been these past five years...
...In fact, it was the best thing of its kind I've seen written about the National Press Club in a long time...
...It is much too late now to turn back the clock on Watergate...
...Grant's article has served to help stir up some new interest in the works and lives of those literary giants of the twenties...
...Attuned to the wevelenghts of modern youth, three of my professors tied in their course to the moral challenge of Watergate--the courses being Introduction to .Aristotle, Basic Reporting, and Ideological Revolt, 1850-1970...
...I especially liked that touch about Abe Lincoln and the paper money...
...These papers are reprinted in Davis' The Unde/iverable(Turing's 1936 paper) and in Feigenbaum's Computers and Thought (Turing's later papers...
...In order thus to defend himself, he must rationalize, perpetuate and thus extend the policies which have brought about America's remarkable decline over these pest five years...
...It might have been prudent, however, to preface the article with an editor's note identifying it as just that, since there may yet be a fewAmericans, even among the distinguished readership of TheAIternative, who labor under the misapprehension: 1) that there actually exists a free market in the private sector, containing many entries who compote faithfully and vigorously with each other, constantly improving their efficiency and the quality of their goods and lowering prices as a result of their increasingly well-honed operations...
...My Spanish professor has yet to comment on El Presidente Nixon...
...But at every point Nixon has invited, and reveled in, the presecution about which he and his apologists like so much to complain...
...Subsequently in 1950, after the appearance of the stored-program general-purpose computer, an attempt was made by Turing to give a definition of machine intelligence ("Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind, vol...
...If the readers wish they may consult Turing's papers...
...Paul Mathless Washington, D.C...
...According to Turing a machine could be called intelligent if it was able to fool a human questioner into thinking that the answers it gave were the answers of a human being and not a machine...
...and more recently he led us against treaty terms ,which failed to provide a sufficient fig leaf for our withdrawal from Indo-China...
...One vaguely recalls that Nixon once tried to lead us against those communists who were willing to sit and wait for him within twenty miles of the Cambodian-South Vietnamese border...
...In my (notoriously unreliable) opinion, it is your best yet...
...Nixon's sole defense, his sole self-justification, is that he is indispensable to our "progress" toward a "generation of peace...
...43, p. 544-46...
...So continue to be shocking and outlandish...
...Hopefully my explanation is precise and clear...
...He, every bit as much as his liberal persecutors, raised the stakes of Watergate to the point that he is now trapped by the ever-escalating revelations...
...Ira L Straus Alberto R. COIl Cochairmen, The Princeton Committee for Solzhenitsyn and Freedom in the Soviet Union Princeton, New Jersey To the Editor: Timothy Wheeler's "The Energy Crisis Is Not a Crisis" (The Alternative, April, 1974) was a marvelous little satire, a very amusing spoof of laissez-faire economics...
...Society, vol...
...2) that the demand for foods, petroleum products, and the like is admirably elastic, in which a few months of nationwide malnutrition or freezing or immobilization, attended benignly by a small, wellconstrained government, will bring those nasty prices down right smartly...
...Neal B. Freemen, Vice President and Editor King Features Syndicate To the Editor: Just a quick note to let you know that the consensus among those law students here in Indianapolis who can read is that the May Alternative is doubtlessly the best magazine ever printed in the Western (and therefore the entire civilized) wodd...
...Nixon lead us against the Soviets...
...Thanks too for his mention of the Algonquin Round Table and its famous guests...
...Turing Machines, however, do exist and can be defined in a precise mathematical way...
...Clyde LaMotte, President National Press Club Washington, D.C...
...wink, chuckle...
...Congratulations to you...
...cheaper than subscdbing to the Wall Street Journal...
...Among them are sprinkled a healthy proportion of faculty who are "lost forever in fantasies about his intellectual and moral superiority...
...If we make our President so weak and powerless by harping on whether he knew that a certain conversation was held on a certain date that he cannot lead us to stand against a system that starves men to death because they satirize the government...
...Sure, his carping critics have prevented him from leading...
...Vive humor, satire, and The Alternativ~ Abe Kalish Executive Secretary, Accuracy it1 Media Washington, D.C...
...To the Editor: I thoroughly enjoyed your April issue editorial on the "i ntellectualoids" permeating .American campuses...
...Those who will lead us against the politics of sell-out are those carping critics in Congress who opposed the wheat deal, amended SALT I, and tded tb help Selzhenitsyn...
...A Turing Machine is an abstract mathematical model of the process of computing...
...We have placed ads in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Wash: ington Star, and the Washington Post...
...Cote Phoenix, Arizona 34 The Alternative June-September 1974...
Vol. 7 • June 1974 • No. 9
