Don Edwards

I suspect that the effect would be the opposite of helping.

My impression is that this is a problem with legislatures (and legislators) in general.

When my father worked at Boeing (medical retirement in early 1970s, so the large majority of paperwork was physically on paper) the word was that if the paperwork on an airplane (by which they meant *each individual* airplane, not just a design) didn't outweigh the plane, it obviously couldn't fly yet. A 747 weighs approximately 600,000 pounds. Empty. That's about 3.6 *million* square meters of standard US 20-pound copy paper. There are about 16.5 pages per square meter. So, just under 60 million pages, assuming they don't use any other size of form (and in fact they routinely used several smaller forms, some of them considerably smaller). The tale may have been an exaggeration - but maybe not. Each individual part, including the rivet fasteners, takes at least two signatures - one from the person who installed it, and one from the quality-control person who checked that it was installed properly. (Dad was on the quality-control side. Including on 747s, his last few years.) Some parts - not rivets, which Boeing buys by the ton - take considerably more than two signatures before they even get to installation. Oh, and if there's a problem with how a part is installed, but it can be fixed, there are two MORE signatures, one from the guy who fixes it and one from a quality-control guy. (I'm not sure how you'd want to count things when the QC guy says "take it out, throw it away, put in a different one" - but it definitely generates extra paperwork. And yes, the QC guys can and do say that.) There are about 1.5 million rivets on a 747. Along with a similar number of other fasteners. And another 3 million or so other parts.

Speculation: the Uryuom that the golem is remembering spoke Old Uryuom, not Modern Uryuom, and either withdrew from Earth or died out here. The modern Uryuom are a much more recent arrival.

Columbus put on his map of what turned out to be the Caribbean, an island which he did not claim to have ever been within sight of. There's an island pretty much where he put it. He got the shape of the island about as close to correct as he did the islands he had actually explored, except slightly rotated relative to a north-south line. Columbus named this island Saint Brendan's Island. Brendan was an Irish monk from a couple centuries earlier. He disappeared from Ireland, and several years later returned with a story (which he wrote down) about being out fishing in a coracle when a storm came up and swept him out to sea. Surviving by fishing and trapping rainwater in the coracle, he (claimed) eventually came to a tropical island, where he lived for a few years before another storm launched him on a repeat of the process taking him back to Ireland. His story described the island in some detail. This is one of several reasons to think that Columbus *knew* he would reach some sort of land well before reaching China. But the promise of riches, that would be believed, would be from a safer trade route to China, not from exploring unknown islands that most people didn't believe existed.

I'm less than happy with the non-consensual transformation of random relatively-innocents, and I am REALLY not happy with the non-consensual MENTAL transformation of random relatively-innocents.

Abraham's responsible for the enchantment on the now-blown-up-and-evaporated diamond. Not necessarily for the existence of it. Alternative theory 3, compatible with either of the prior two: The golem wants to deny the power of the wooden core to humanity, because it's a wand with a particular spell that was anathema AND blasphemous (and a few other really bad things) according to the golem-makers' culture. That spell is... ... now what comic are you reading? Isn't it obvious? ... sex-change magic.

Goonmanji2 is a very elaborately-strangely shaped wand with an odd way for the users to pick which of its spells to cast (some of which have odd restrictions on whom they can be cast on). But it's ultimately *completely* under the players' control - they can walk away from the game, they can decide not to play, they can read the cards to get an idea of what might happen *before* deciding whether or not to play... Definitely empowering with a light touch of guiding. What Voltaire did to Dex was closer to take-over... but the way immortal law works, Voltaire had to convince nobody but himself that it was okay.

Alternate theory 1: the golem made the diamond, in order to seal up whatever magic was in the wooden core. Alternate theory 2: someone/thing else made the diamond in order to hide the core from the golem.

That's exactly why I gave up on the pun...

... trying to make a pun about just how serious she might have been, without getting too overtly political ... ... giving up ...

WOOT! Good goin' Prof!

Possibly the Endless Barrel of Exposition is disguised as a wand, and has been dubbed "Kevin".

As useful for detecting wizards. No comment on other sorts of current and potential magic-users. And perhaps not as instantly annoying, but I suspect he's even more annoying in the long run. The detection wand, after all, isn't self-activating.

And of course there are good reasons no time traveler killed Hitler or any of his ancestors...

"raccoon"? To answer the question: she's not used to being able to cast spells at all, she has no idea what spells the wand has, she sees a need for immediate effect, she's panicking.

He doesn't have to be extremely bad - he just has to be significantly inferior to other readily-available options. Piers Anthony's The Source of Magic references a number of useless magical powers (the one I remember is the ability to make colored spots temporarily appear on things - they have no side effects and last only seconds unless the caster concentrates on them). Maybe this wand teaches a number of such spells, while they have other wands that teach useless spells. Or maybe this wand is just a really bad teacher. (Most likely, IMHO, it's from a previous magic system.)

I vaguely remember reading suggestions that the human radio signal has already gotten quieter than it once was. That is certainly at least somewhat plausible. Between developing more and more sensitive radio receivers (so we don't need to broadcast as loudly in order to hear ourselves), using directional antennas for efficiency (so we aren't broadcasting equally loudly in all directions, just as loudly as we need to in the direction we care about plus some quieter slop), and replacing some of our necessarily-loudest broadcasts - e.g. transatlantic communications - with cables and fiber-optics (so those transmitters are turned off).

I think I'm married to her.

The overwhelming majority of writers who've commented on this in my presence at sci-fi conventions agree that somewhere in excess of 80% of the time, the writer loses the argument. A few said they've lost every time. I've only encountered one who denied ever losing such an argument - and he denied ever *having* such an argument. I've only had one argument with one of my characters. She pointed out that it didn't make sense for her to be physically capable of what I was asking of her. She was absolutely right. The solution is a drug... with side effects and after-effects. Which leads to a possible sequel. All in all, I'm happy to have lost that argument. That is, aside from the fact that she began by whacking me across the back of the head... with claws... and she's a 30-pound felinoid tree-dweller...

IMHO a good writer does. Spear-carrier #3 has a wife and kids, one of whom had an interesting (child-appropriate) adventure the night before, while Spear-Carrier #4 has his eye on a young lady and hopes of winning a poetry competition next week... It makes the world feel realistic. In reality, very few people are JUST Spear-Carrier #3. Most people have their own stories. Maybe not very interesting stories, but stories nonetheless.

I *can* tell fairly-involved stories about quite a few of my minor characters. Using NP, Dan *does*.

Or maybe it has a book to return...

On Thursday we planned to go from Pocatello to Butte, spend Friday there, and finish the trip on Saturday. A few miles across the Montana state line we were in a snowstorm. Drove through it. It got thinner a few times, finally we got out of it... and then started into another one just before we got to Dillon. So we decided to call it quits there. By the time we went to bed Dillon had 5 inches of snow on the ground. (We heard that Bozeman got two feet.) The weather forecasts said Friday would be the best day for nearly a week to get out of Dillon... and said the same thing, only maybe more so, about Butte. So on Friday we made a slightly-longer-than-usual drive to our usual summer area an hour from Missoula. Fortunately, once we got onto the main streets of Dillon every road we cared about was clear. And this after I made my lady wait a week longer than she wanted to, in order to avoid bad weather.

Well, the US in WWII did come up with a way to make ships that were literally unsinkable in water. It consisted of making aircraft carriers for North-Atlantic service out of ice and sawdust (because just ice, shatters). The ice, of course, would float in the ocean no matter what. They never actually made any, though.