Ornith: you're thinking of Alan Sokal's wonderfully-constructed hoax 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' (Social Text 46/47, pp. 217-252). Sokal has an enormous amount of info on the hoax, its aftermath, and what it implies here.

(It's especially notable that the journal refused to publish his exposure of his own article as a hoax...)

Entities that intend to be people care about who they are and what they're named.

Of course this doesn't mean that they're using their legal name. It just means they're using a name they use a lot. (e.g., I've been using this pseudonym for fifteen years. It's not my legal name, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go around calling people rapists any more than I would using my legal name. --- well, not unless they were.)

This is a mistake I've seen made over and over again: `you're not using your legal name so you're untrustworthy!'

Just because you're not using your legal name doesn't necessarily mean you're scum. Neither does using your legal name imply you're not a conman.

Terry@#132, her name is, um, 'Nielsen Hayden'. i before e ;}

Tom @#33, I really can't see much 'editorial stylebook' in these guidelines (although I'd not be surprised if they *did* look like an editorial stylebook, given the number of books on my shelves with TNH's name on the inside cover or in the acknowledgements). They pretty much reduce to 'we reserve the right to do whatever the hell we feel we need to do to prevent the BoingBoing comment system becoming a worthless sewer that nobody actually reads'. (For proof that she's truly excellent at this, look no further than Making Light's comment threads. A more astonishing collection of often-hilarious erudition maintained for thousands of comments at a time I have never seen. It makes unmoderated forums look like white noise. And this is done with what is, to be blunt, a fairly light touch: the great majority of posts seem to go through unchanged.)

As an aside, I find the statement 'We throw the book at you' interesting, coming from the author of the book _Making Book_. I wonder if this book is like a boomerang, in that it returns to her hand so she can throw it again? (I mean, *obviously* there's only one of it.)

Far more than Ellison, Varley has a habit of writing things that make me go 'I don't believe he did that, nobody else would dare!'

Even ignoring the immortal opening line of _Steel Beach_, there's the bizarre predelictions of the enemy in _Demon_, the talking nuclear bomb in one short story that's happy to tell all passers-by that it is in fact a nuke, and when it will detonate (a sort of high-tech suicide bomber), and perhaps most of all _The Golden Globe, which is the Varley attempt at that old SF staple, the almost-plotless travelogue, which turns into something best described as a Shakespearean picaresque shaggy dog story (with assassins, artists, and sarcastic AIs.)

I really must get around to reading this latest trilogy: I'm afraid that shortage of shelf space and the habit of some publishers of cancelling engaging series halfway through has led to me only buying SF series when they're completed. (I'm in mourning for Tony Daniel's gonzo two-thirds-complete _Metaplanetary_ series: if it's been finished while I wasn't looking, someone please say!)

Jeff @#3, there *was* a big downside that existed on PortalPlayer targets (like the iPod) for a long time: the battery life was drastically reduced, to perhaps 1/2 of that seen with the native firmware. Because this bug was longstanding, a lot of webpages and google hits on the net refer to it: but *it is history*. Any build from the last month or so has solved it for good on the iPod, and largely solved it on other PP targets: I now see battery lifespans *better* than that achieved with the original firmware (12hrs on my two-year-old iPod Video).

Also, because Rockbox is largely a reverse-engineering effort, there are some unavoiable downsides. Ignoring the no-DRM thing (oh, what a tragic loss), there are two substantial downsides. Firstly, the only well-supported players are generally old enough that they're no longer being made. Currently *all* supported players are no longer being made; e.g. currently-on-sale iPods won't work with it thanks to Apple starting to engage in encryption games to prevent firmware replacement. Secondly, specialized one-player hardware is unlikely to be supported, especially if it's not documented well. For instance, the iPod Video's (annoying) piezoelectric clicker doesn't click, its dock protocol is hardly supported at all and its Broadcom video chip isn't supported, so actually playing videos in Rockbox on the iPod is out of the question unless you like jerk-o-vision. These problems are all profoundly uninteresting as far as I'm concerned.

But in every other domain --- openness/hackability, variety of supported codecs, configurability, documentation, blind-friendliness, ease of uploading from random strange OSes, variety of silly games, even sound quality --- Rockbox beats every supported device firmware I've seen into the ground and leaves it a barely recognisable heap, and because it acts similarly on virtually every player it runs on, jumping to a new (supported) player is generally easy, as the user interface stays pretty much the same. It's skinnable enough that it's pretty easy to come up with a user interface that outdoes the iPod for sheer flashiness, and several such have already been produced. (I've had people on the train ask me how they could get their iPod's UIs looking like mine...)

It's a project *well* worth supporting.

A close GRB would be very destructive, certainly, but 'effectively incinerate the earth' is debatable.

Causing most plant life to catch on fire, yeah, that's easy, the Chixulub impact most likely did that. Complete vapourization, no chance. As Dutch has pointed out, if the Sun were to go supernova the Earth's surface would ablate at hundreds of metres per second, leading to vapourization on a timescale of days.

GRBs simply don't last that long, and a 2.5 millionfold scale-up still wouldn't let it vapourize the Earth in the times they last unless it were closer to us than the Sun is now.

Sounds like something out of _A Colder War_.

WARNING.

The following briefing film is classified SECRET OINTMENT TORMENT SPAGHETTI. If you do not have SECRET OINTMENT TORMENT SPAGHETTI clearance, leave the auditorium now and report to your unit security officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.
You have sixty seconds to comply.

'Of course words can hurt you. If words mean something, they have the power to hurt.'

And TNH comes up with *another* aphorism for our time.

(I must start collecting a file of these.)

Has anyone asked around to see if a Dr. Enrique Borgos is around there anywhere? It seems like his handiwork.

(`... where it encountered some chemical conditions which caused it to... set. Like soft plaster. Entirely blocking the main drain...')

(Time to find someone 'of previous rich military experience with drains' to sort it out.)

(btw, when I hit Preview, no post button is visible. Is this intended?)

It's a fearsome anti-troll weapon, devised by our charming moderator many years ago and subsequently adopted by countless others.

Targetted dribblings are not --- quite --- rendered unreadable. Anyone who really cares what you wrote can still read them: but the rest of us don't have to.

At one point in 2001 (when I was passing through that station daily), the sandwich shop at the end of the row you show had a sign outside reading simply `FOOD'.

I asked, and yes, they sometimes do put up silly signs just to play with people's heads. :)

I've never seen this done in the UK (probably because the UK's English grammar teaching is basically nonexistent). It strikes me as notably ugly and unpleasant compared to a simple annotated parse tree, but maybe that's just me.

I'm not sure what the point is of English grammar teaching at sub-university level anyway: native speakers handle it automatically, everyone else of lower-school age picks it up from the native speakers pretty effectively, and the 'grammar' they teach in most schools is so inaccurate as to be worthless (no, `the' is not an adjective).

Just hit them over the head with the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, I say. :)

I'm amazed that nobody mentioned David Langford's _Earthdoom_...

I'm afraid I didn't think very much of it. As is so often true of Sterling's work, the *ideas* are great, but the *execution* makes me go `bleah'. The principal problem is that the narrative voice is *exactly the same* as that in countless other Sterling works, so I can't read it without wondering why I've fallen into _Bicycle Repair Man_ yet again.

It really saps the characterization: I read this yesterday and already the character of Borislav has blurred in my memory into the protagonist of every single other near-future Sterling story. (I was hopeful that the `wounded veteran' thing might indicate a change of narrative voice. No such luck.)

I still read Sterling's stuff, but I'm very close to saying 'no more'. He seems to be writing the same story over and over again: a sort of standardized characterization template into which you can plug new ideas to generate a new story.

Bah. Don't listen to Hoagland. Listen to Geoff Landis.

His short yet hard-hitting expose _What We Really Do Here At NASA_ blows the lid off the organization and reveals what's really beneath. And of course he really works there, so it must be true.

(or something like that, anyway!)

Having lived for a year on the same floor of the same hall of residence as appears to be featured here, I find this... oddly disturbing.

(Before this I would have considered it physically impossible for six people to *fit* in one of those rooms.)

Chang@#17, no, not zombies. Reality has just outdone art, is all.

We have two *separate* shadowy groups, each backing different sides.

Structuring it as a donation would be an extremely effective way of preventing people outside North America from buying any. (I'm not sure how easy it is for Canadians).

Other countries have charitable donation systems too, but they don't in general link up with the US one, and generally seem to apply only to charities registered in the particular country concerned.