Bill Gosper: "I just remembered that this writeup used to have a preface that began 'Continued fractions are hard to like. People who like continued fractions drive Citroens and eat pickled okra.' Followed by some disparagement of people who eat with bent metal objects instead of chopsticks. I can't Google this anywhere. I bet somebody has a hardcopy." Albers & Alexanderson put together "More Mathematical People" (1990) which I'm certain I have but can't at the moment locate. Therein are the first few paragraphs. Google Books search results and the annoying snippet views within the book itself sometimes generates sufficient overlap to find the next snippet/text. Toggling thus, I have: Continued fractions are hard to like. People who like continued fractions eat pickled okra and drive Citroens. Books on the subject are filled with dull proofs of dull properties, and recent papers relating continued fractions to computers have bordered on libel. But the literature is not the real problem. Let's face it; a continued fraction is a very awkward object for our intuitions to grasp. Just to estimate the size of a purely numerical continued fraction would seem, at first, to require discarding all but the first few terms, followed by converting to improper fractions in a bottom-to-top repetition. Since it isn't immediately clear how much error we committed by discarding the "tail" we have been penalized for asking even a simple question about size. Do continued fractions suffer from the "observer effect"? Why, if they are so intractable, are we about to attempt arithmetic with them? In fact, modern mathematical writers have denied the feasibility of the idea! Of course, chopsticks are, at first, very awkward objects for our fingers to grasp, and many Chinatown tourists have doubted the feasibility of eating with them. With practice and the proper technique, however, we eventually learn to pity those poor Europeans who must stab their salad greens with a sour-tasting, bent metal object with no moving parts. Such is the pity I feel for everyone who must crunch his numbers decimally, or cast his points to float among electronic registers. I will admit that continued fraction techniques are not the best way to handle everything, but then neither are chopsticks.