Listen closely Marvin Minsky's arch, eclectic, charmingly offhand talk on health, overpopulation and the human mind is packed with subtlety wit, wisdom and just an ounce of wily, is he joking? advice.

And I can admire his unyielding and, yes, sometimes wily commitment to reconciliation, which saved his country from the race war that those who refused to accept the end of white minority rule saw as inevitable. How wrong they were, and how miraculous was Mandela s achievement in making even his most implacable enemies feel at home in post apartheid South Africa.