The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Kevin J. Maroney:

I used to do "secret shopper" evaluations, where a company under contract to various chain stores would send people to $CHAIN_STORE to see if the service, quality of goods, etc. were up to the standards dictated by $CHAIN_STORE's national office.

I did three or four shops at Home Depot. One of the parts of the test was to wander slowly around the heart of the store with a shopping cart, obviously looking for something, to see how long it took for someone to offer me assistance. If I didn't get assistance in twenty minutes, I was to approach someone directly and move on to the next part of the strip.

I never *once* got assistance volunteered to me. I found this incredibly depressing (not to mention time-consuming), so I told my employer that I wouldn't do them any more.

I did have some people walk away from me as I walked up to ask them for assistance, but never anything as bad as what you described here.

So ... when will it be available as a paperback, like the others in the series, so that I'm able to buy it at Waldenbooks?

Paperback? Right now! That's a real, paper-and-ink-and-professional-binding trade paperback, just like the previous three volumes from Tachyon Press. Available in bookstores (though probably only as a special order) or over the air.

Mass-market paperback? That's not going to happen. There are very, very few "year's best" short fiction collections in mass-market any more--unless I'm missing something, the only such is Hartwell and Cramer's Year's Best Science Fiction.

We just lost one of our rats* so I'm particularly sympathetic.

*I'd say it was damn careless of us except that we took him to the vet's about three days earlier and he had no visible symptoms of anything wrong.

Little Agnes will grow strong on your blood. Fear the hammie!

One of the greatest feats in the history of unions was when the American longshoremen unions (there are separate unions for the East and West coasts) arranged the transition from traditional stevedore work (a manual-labor-intensive, expensive process) to containerized cargo handlers in the 1960s. In the process, the number of people employed as longshoremen/stevedores dropped approximately 90%, but the remaining members had vastly increased salaries as crane operators, inspectors, planners, and so forth, and the others were (largely) retrained into other, better jobs outside of shipping.

It's hard to imagine several tens of thousands of individual workers negotiating such a graceful transition.

PNH @ 74: "Arabia =/= the Arab world".

I know that. However, I chose the word with some consideration. Baghdad is, historically, the crown city of Arabia; the parts that the Saudis now control are, other than the cities of the two Mosques, peripheral to Arabia.

But these days I'm spending too much time back in the 9th century, when Baghdad was the actual seat of an actual Caliphate. Perhaps I let that force me into affectation.

Actually, "uitmaken" sounds very much like the evolution of the English verb "to perfect"--"to make complete, to finish", though not perfectly so.

My read is more like Teresa's: You would have to be a mouth-breathing moron to not view "I am throwing my shoes at you" as an act of hostility, and you're right that pretty much every aspect of coverage of our war on Iraq has been saturated with "study shows Iraqis feel pain, mourn loss of dead", as the Onion put it.

But it's worth separately noting that showing the sole of the shoe has an aspect of ritualized contempt in Iraq (or perhaps in Arabia), and that's how the immediate news coverage I heard (NPR, WCBS/CBS radio) covered it.

Because of my build and problems in my nasal passages, I'm borderline apneaic. I have had a tremendous reduction in symptoms in the last few months by treating my chronic nasal inflammation and by learning to sleep face-down rather than face-up. Less pressure on the throat means less constricted breathing. Before I made the conscious effort to go to sleep face-down, I would usually turn over in the night and wake up face-down anyway.

Not all snoring is tied to apnea, but enough of it is that if you seriously snore, you should definitely get checked out.

I volunteered in a hospital for several years (yes, I was a teenaged candystriper, though they didn't make the boys wear the vest--I got to wear a real lab jacket) and I never heard anyone actually call it a cannula. It's just "the oxygen feed".

(I am so pleased that he's got words, even if only a few. Please tell him that being frustrated that he can't speak more is like being frustrated that he can't climb the Empire State Building without taking a few breaks. He's strong and smart, he'll understand.)

"10:19 PM: Russian 'aggression' against Georgia. Neither one of them mentions that South Ossetia is nominally independent."

Well, of course, Georgia doesn't acknowledge that South Ossetia is independent--that's what the whole micro-war was about. More important is that no one in the American commentariat points out that the Georgians started shooting first. (In response to Russian troop movements, admittedly, but Russia has no current interest in invading Georgia as a whole.) Georgia is rattling its saber in the assumption that the US will go to hot war with Russia to protect Georgia, and Nasty McCain is actively encouraging them. Obama + Biden, less so, but not enough less so.

The Holocaust has been reduced to a Bush party buzzword for a while now. (Of course, "the new Hitler" has been around even longer, but that's more cross-party.)

The presence of a one-time pad is difficult to conceal and a functional admission of guilt.

One of the brilliant bits of Bruce Schneier's Solitaire Cipher (referenced above--it's the cipher in Cryptonomicon) is that the decryption pad is a deck of cards. Everyone has a deck of cards. You can key the deck to a Bridge column in a newspaper that both the sender and receiver reliably get, or (these days) to a Bridge website.

I've long thought that Usenet, esp. the binaries newsgroups, would be a great source of random data for one-time pads and a great hiding place for steganographic messages.

What doesn't make sense is that the dress code makes a big deal about the distinction between suits, on the one hand, and sport-coat-and-slacks outfits on the other. Both of these fall squarely in the jacket-and-tie category of office monkey suits. Presenting sport coats as a more casual option, permissible on Sundays, is at least a generation out of date.

This level of specificity, and formality, is not uncommon in parts of the financial sector. E.g., the written dress code at my job specifies suit + tie as business formal, mandatory, except on Fridays when jacket + tie passes for "casual".

It would not surprise me at all to learn that the dress code at the Sun was copied from a brokerage firm.

Al Giordano has the right instinct in his translation ("I got elected and therefore I am better than all of you!"), but uses more words than necessary. In fact, the Bush-McCain philosophy is "Shut up and be ruled."

Semprini?

Can an omnipotent, omniscient God (leaving aside omnibenevolence) construct a formal, recursively enumerable theory that proves basic arithmetic truths in which there are no true statements which are not provable?

I mean, sure, Bruce Schneier can do it. But can such a god?

Neil from Chicago, "But Judaism is non-Hellenistic..."

Tell that to Philo of Alexandria, the most important Jewish thinker between Ezra and Maimonides, and whose interests were all bound up in harmonizing Judaic and Greek thought. In fact, my (semi-formed) impression is that much or all of the post-Second Temple conception of monotheism has its roots in Philo. The movement of Judaism from "we worship the best god, who is very much like a human being but more powerful" to "we worship the only god, who is nothing like a human being" appears to me to be deeply influenced by Philo's work.

Lori:

Every vote is a compromise. You don't get points in heaven for holding true to a principle while allowing things to get worse on earth.

From the Law.com legal dictionary:

publication

n. 1) anything made public by print (as in a news- paper, magazine, pamphlet, letter, telegram, computer modem or program, poster, brochure or pamphlet), orally, or by broadcast (radio, television) . . .

3) in the law of defamation (libel and slander) publication of an untruth about another to at least one single person. Thus one letter can be the basis of a suit for libel, and telling one person is sufficient to show publication of slander.

So, yes, a public reading of a letter definitely constitutes "publication".

Thanks, Madeline--that was the phrase I was looking for.

William Sanders is dead to me.

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