Thank You Richard Feynman

After a brief discussion about murderous vacuum cleaners, I finally compelled Monk to check out a copy of The Singers of Time from the library[0]. I forgot just how good this book is in parts. To wit, I'd completely forgotten the following, which I had to prove to myself by writing some Perl:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

$s =<<"EOL";
How I want a drink? Alcoholic,
of course, after the heavy
chapters involving
quantum mechanics.
EOL

print
  map {
    chomp;
    s/[^\w]//g; 
    length;
  }
  split(/\s+/, $s);

[0] God bless the KCLS.

Update: Fixed to support Blogspot's narrow columns. And I would be remiss to mention "murderous vacuum cleaners" and not say something about Roger MacBride Allen's "The Modular Man", a four-part sci-fi courtroom story that appeared in Analog when I was in 7th grade and whose existence was shown to me by my English teacher. Thanks, Ms. Rocco.