The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Steve:

Of course, Columbus' attempt to find a shorter route to China was predicated on horrible miscalculation of the size of the Earth; any educated person of late 15th c. Europe knew that the Earth was round, but Columbus was convinced that it was smaller than conventional wisdom said and cherrypicked classical authors to make his case. His out-of-the-box thinking failed to result in his and his crew's deaths only due to running smack into the West Indes (which Columbus insisted validated his crackpot ideas).

You may draw your own conclusions about the meaning of this in relation to Tom Friedman.

For people who earn their livings who depend on email, spam IS injurious to their business and earning ability, because the filtering can delete legitimate business from customers, clients, and other business associates, and lock up their computer systems. That IS financially injurious. And again, the time and effort involved with spam handling--identifying it, deleting it, filtering it it--is wasted time for the vast majority of people.

I have wasted hours of my life cleaning out comment spam, so I have sympathy with your desire to see the problem solved. And I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that the government is helpful with lots of stuff. But there's a weird and kind of creepy elision going on -- spam is irritating and costly to deal with, but it's not a violent crime, nor even one that tends to cost a single individual a great deal of harm from any one participant. I'm not capable of fleshing out my disquiet -- it has to do with Guiliani and the broken windows urban crimefighting methodology, I think -- but it's there nonetheless.

Steve Eley is entirely right about email spam; I'm not at all sure that comment spam is the same model of problem (nor am I at all sure that it's nearly as profitable for the spammers, but I've never seen any studies done).

And finally, sf-ish people: did any writers actually predict spam? It's such a universal complaint now, but I can't think of any near-future-type writers who seemed to think of the concept before it actually arrived with the Green Card Lawyers. Seems like the sort of thing that would have been right up Bruce Sterling's alley, but I think it might have just blindsided everyone (not least of which are the people who coded sendmail).

The old man looked at the Marine and said, "Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it."

Buddy Rich for President!

His Galatea 2.2 crosses the line into SF IMHO, and is almost as good (which is very, very good indeed).

Yes. I'd say it's the best novel in the genre I've ever read (although certainly not the best genre novel, which is hardly surprising, given that Powers is both a brilliant novelist and almost completely uninterested in any of the world-building exercises that make science fiction fans salivate). It makes me cry, and I can count the number of books that did that on one hand.

I really want to recommend R. A. Lafferty to Randall, but he's a hit-or-miss taste (though a fine one! And any day I can plug Lafferty is a good day!). I'll second the recommendation for Bruce Sterling, as he's highly reminiscent of Warren Ellis. I'll vote for Distraction over Zeitgeist, although Zeitgeist is more Ellis-like.

And, umm, as an actual book not hitherto recommended, I'll go with Michael Swanwick's amazing Stations of the Tide.

Gresham's law doesn't refer to counterfeit money as such; it refers to specie minted using less precious metal, either by mixing it with base metal or by shaving the weight -- I believe the formulation refers to "light coin". But the idea that the bad coin circulates while the good coin is hoarded is right; if you can get $1 worth of goods for $.95 worth of currency, that's the way to go.

waaah. marilee gave me a shapenote song earworm. and i can't find an mp3 of that one to get rid of it, either.

A misreading of the opening line started Chan "Cat Power" Marshall's version of "Sea of Love" ricocheting through my head, but that was a problem more easily remedied.

Sara, Interplanet Janet is a criminally underappreciated work in the Schoolhouse Rock oeuvre.

Those who are interested may well be able to track down the cover version done by the B-movie-damaged surf guitar band Man or Astroman?.

Diana Wynne Jones' Year of the Griffin...

Fans of Ms. Jones' work may be excited to know that Hayao Miyazaki (director of Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and many others) is adapting Howl's Moving Castle to the screen. Last I heard, it was due out in Japan in late 2004.

Besides A Wrinkle in Time, my favorite tale of the fourth dimension is William Sleater's The Boy Who Reversed Himself. Anyone else read that one?

Yup. Mucho fun, as are Sleator's marvelously creeptastic children's books House of Stairs and (less obviously) Interstellar Pig. I just got Into the Dream out of the library a few weeks ago, and I enjoyed it (I think the darkness of the ending escaped me when I was 9). Sleator's brother, Tycho (that Tycho), has a copy of Sleator's childhood memoir, Oddballs, up on the web.

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