Amusing

Awhile ago I mentioned that a quote from Seeker's Mask ("That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" had gone quasi-viral.   For example, on a list of 100 famous quotes it appears just after Gandhi and Hitler.  Eliezer Yudkowsky (Machine Intelligence Research Institute) cites it to elaborate the second virtue of rationality.  And you can buy it printed on a t-shirt or a trucker’s hat.  Fame, huh?  Anyway, that was a character speaking (Kirien), not necessarily me.

The most recent stir is that people have finally decided that a similar quote credited to Carl Sagan probably is no such thing, having first appeared (as far as anyone can make out) around 2013.   Seekers Mask was published in 1994, I think, and Sagan died in 1996.  Anyway, we'll see how that plays out.

A bit more annoying, one site accuses me of being ungrammatical, and people keep inserting a comma after "truth."   True, the sentence has an odd construction.  I think, though, that I'm right in seeing the first restrictive clause as the subject and the final verb as the predicate.   A Ph.d. in English Lit ought to be good for something.

Two weeks ago I finished the current novel, or thought that I did.  Then I re-read the end and hated it.  It's currently going in a different direction while fighting me tooth and nail, word by word.  Thank goodness I have until May 1 to straighten things out.