I read this book years ago and I loved it. I have apparently lost my copy, so I am ordering another one.

I teach information systems. One of the things I tell my students is to be VERY careful of what they say in e-mail. For, although I am not sure of love and taxes, I do know that email is forever.

I tell my students that e-mail is 'disembodied text'. We are sorely lacking in the punctuation to fully express ourselves. I have many more feelings than '?' and '!'.

How many times have our e-mails been misconstrued because the reader did not get the irony, or cynicism, or joking intent of our message?

Now enter METAPUNCTUATION!!! with many more symbols to more fully express ourselves.

But our ASCII character set, with just 256 possible characters, does not have room for more characters. And therein lies the problem. We must first adopt to the unicode character set (which supports over 65,000 different characters), before we can create new punctuation symbols. And boy do I have some ideas about new characters.

Ohhh, about this book. It is VERY funny. And you will learn just how lacking our character set is for fully expressing ourselves.

Keep that in mind when you write you next e-mail.

This book is quite silly. The authors crack the book up enormously, and then fail to deliver. Particularly the chapter called Demystifying Math was a huge letdown. There are no general, structured ways to think presented that will enhance your problem-solving skills, just a few hardly interesting probabilities. It's kind of annoying given how the authors praise their own book all the time. For example, they talk about some brilliant people like John von Neumann, and go on to say "each of them knew how to think smart mathematically without having read this book. Just how this was possible we are not certain...". Alright, they are not dead serious, but it's annoying given how ridiculous the Math chapter in fact is. And the book is packed with "like a Mensan would", "Mensans love this", Mensans love that", "a real Mensan would" etc etc. I don't consider this book a total waste of money, because it doesn't cost much and there's the occasional interesting fact.

the surprise part is surprisingly not one.

This book is one for all you mega mind wizards. This will get you thinking and working.