News You Can Bruise for 2002 July 15

It wasn't a fish being confused by a fishing lure. It was a whale being confused by a bunch of bananas.

My stomach feels better, and diagnoses range from heatstroke to extremely selective food poisoning. I predict that a big scare in 10 years or so, spurred by alarmist pieces in Time and Readers Digest, will be "microterrorism": plausibly deniable acts of sabotage which merely annoy individuals or small groups of people. My ailment was ahead of its time; in the future I suspect it will be labelled microbioterrorism (an ambiguous set of modifiers; since it will be futurenow, perhaps it will be given an especially stupid newterm like 'narrowbodterror', where the whole thing is ambiguous).

Sumana called me to tell me she's been offered a job. Huzzah!

It seems like a long time ago, but it was only seven elements ago (Palladium, oddly enough) when Zack showed me the Periodic Table of Science Fiction. An ongoing project of Michael Swanwick to write a tiny science fiction story about each element on the periodic table, in ascending order of atomic weight. Sometimes it's a story, anyway. Vanadium is just a rant:

There is so little to be said in vanadium's favor! It is a soft and ductile white metal. So what? Its boiling point is 3,450° Centigrade. Who cares? It has no desirable properties and, worse, no ambition to achieve any. There it is, and there it will stay. I've wasted more than enough time on it already. I wash my hands of it forever!

The concept is cooler than the average story in the series, but could you do any better?

Could you use a Free Grant of $10,000 to $156,000
but, not exceeding $5,000,000?

V-mail Kriswise! Totally blazzo!

I feel burnt out. I haven't been able to write a line of non-work-related code for a few weeks, not even the minimal changes needed to reinstate Tonight's Episode or get rid of the entries in my referer logs from that evil company that wants you to pay to salt other people's referer logs with your URL.

For a while it was a chore to update NYCB, and I had to push myself to do at least one entry every day, but I think I broke that today.