start on timebinding animals

chapters

@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@
 ./general_purpose/index.md
 ./diff/index.md
 ./web/index.md
+./timebinding_animals/index.md
 ./miscellany/index.md
 ./further_reading/index.md
 ./links.md

further_reading/index.md

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-9. further reading
+11. further reading
 ==================
 
 - _The Unix Programming Environment_ - Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike

miscellany/index.md

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-8. a miscellany of tools and techniques
+10. a miscellany of tools and techniques
 =======================================
 
 dict

timebinding_animals/index.md

@@ -1,8 +1,38 @@
-heinlein
-korzybski
-timebinding animals
-scripting
-makefiles
-memory
-why do i write?
+9. time-binding animals
+=======================
 
+When I was a kid, I read pretty much all of Robert A. Heinlein's Science
+Fiction (the short stories, the early novels, the late novels, everything).
+Heinlein was something of a disciple of a guy named Alfred Korzybski, who had
+built up one of those elaborate intellectual systems where the whole thing may
+be kind of cracked, but there are some useful ideas in there.  You can get a
+sense of the flavor of his work from the fact that he wrote a book called
+_Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General
+Semantics_.
+
+I've never read Korzybski's book, though maybe one day I'll make an attempt.
+One of the bits that stuck for me, via Heinlein's fiction, was the notion that
+humans, unique in the animal kingdom, are "time binders":  Creatures capable of
+accumulating knowledge and retaining it between generations, so that one set of
+us can pick up where another set of us left off, not only learning things
+within an individual lifetime, but benefiting from the learning of previous
+lives and transmitting our own progress well beyond the temporal boundaries of
+a single existence.
+
+There's a useful sense in which the history of civilization is the history of
+technology, broadly understood.  And a good deal of the history of technology
+is bound up in the ways that technology augments and amplifies memory.
+
+the computer as an extension of memory
+--------------------------------------
+
+There's an important 
+
+To cover:
+
+* heinlein
+* korzybski
+* timebinding animals
+* scripting
+* makefiles
+* memory