I am somehow disappointed to find that Volokh knew before I did that Duncan Frissell, with whom I exchanged some interesting mail on and around the Extropians list back when, has a you-know-what.
what family doesn’t have its ups and downs?
If we persons of pallor are all descended from Charlemagne, we could still one-up each other on what fraction of our ancestry is royal, or how few of the links in the chain are female.
If a genie offered me three wishes, my third (after a godlike physique and knowledge of all human languages) might be for a genealogical database covering the last million years. It would be fun to find out, for example, who are my most distant living kin.
I knew him when he posted to alt.peeves
Recent reading: Toast and other rusted futures, short stories by Charlie Stross, most of which can be described as humorous dys-extropian.
2006: This item formerly linked to Charlie’s story “Lobsters”, which is part of Accelerando.
How about that loon Ashcroft, eh, going against a grand old tradition of squeezing the Constitution for every drop of authority it could be construed to grant to Washington. The nerve!
You’ll probably hear it repeated, if you haven’t already, that the Supreme Court in US v Miller (1939) upheld a conviction for illegal possession of a short shotgun, on the grounds that Jack Miller was not enrolled in an organized militia. That’s the conventional story, and it is inaccurate. (For one thing, Miller was never convicted; the government appealed a dismissal.) ( . . more . . )
Blood Libel at SFSU
[link changed; my original links for this item are 404]
G Bernard Shaw
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.