Have Spacesuit, Will Travel (Robert Heinlein).

Startide Rising (David Brin)

The Mote In God’s Eye (Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle)

The Shockwave Rider (John Brunner)

The Warrior’s Apprentice (Lois McMaster Bujold)

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon (Spider Robinson)

Little Fuzzy (H. Beam Piper)

Ready Player One (Ernest Cline)

Wasp (Eric Frank Russell)

Hospital Station (James White)

Mistborn (Brandon Sanderson)

Needle (Hal Clement)

Lest Darkness Fall (L. Sprague de Camp)

The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester)

The Stainless Steel Rat (Harry Harrison)

The Ship Who Sang (Anne McCaffrey)

1632 (Eric Flint)

Neutron Star (Larry Niven)

The Trouble Twisters (Poul Anderson)

The Space Merchants (Frederik Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth)

Accelerando (Charles Stross)

The news: This is the kind of story that sounds simply too absurd and horrifying to be real.

Meriam Yehya Ibrahim Ishag is a 27-year-old Sudanese woman, who was raised an Orthodox Christian by her mother. In 2011, she married a Christian man and had a child with him; she is now eight months pregnant with her second child.

And this week, she was sentenced to 100 lashes and execution by hanging — all because her absent father was Muslim.

Under Sudanese law, Ibrahim's religion is determined by her father's. Although she herself identifies as Christian, the government considers her as Muslim, and as such, has found her guilty of apostasy: the crime of abandoning one's religion, which is punishable by death. Read More

For at least fifteen years my name and its tri-letterization has been something with which you could conjure up a lot of attention among hackers and other sorts of geek. This fact presented the more clueful of my personal friends with a delicate problem: under what circumstances would it be proper for them to invoke this instrument?

I have actually been asked for guidance about this more than once. I developed some guidelines more than a decade ago. To the best my knowledge my friends have been pretty good about applying them. I present them here for your amusement.

1. Please do not drop my name to score cheap social-status points. That’s crass and I don’t like it.

2. Do drop my name if by doing so you can achieve some mission objective of which I would approve. Examples that have come up: encouraging people to design in accordance with the Unix philosophy, or settling a dispute about hacker slang, or explaining why it’s important for everyone’s freedom for the hacker community to hang together and not get bogged down in internal doctrinal disputes.

3. Do drop my name if by doing it you can rock someone’s world in a positive way. A case of this that comes up fairly often is encouraging a young proto-hacker.

4. Do drop my name if doing so would be funny. Funny is even an acceptable excuse for scoring social-status points with it – if you think I’ll laugh when I hear the story, go right ahead.

And yes, I apply these rules (or obvious analogs thereof) to myself. I think it’s vulgar to wave my fame around in contexts where it’s irrelevant. It can be very amusing, if you’re clued in, to watch what happens when somebody in a group of programmers (or gamers or SF fans or any other population that oversamples programmers) that hasn’t met me before twigs to The Presence.

If this attitude seems odd to you, understand that fame is exhausting and psychologically dangerous (I have a lot more sympathy for rock stars who fuck themselves up with drugs than before I felt the pressure myself). Ironic detachment from one’s own celebrity is, I have found, an effective coping strategy.

Here is a curious fact.

My wife Cathy is using Duolingo to learn German; she wants to be able to read sources on Iron Age and Viking costume in the original.

Duolingo takes her through a lot of pronunciation drills.

I’ve learned something by listening to her – which is that somehow, somewhere, I have internalized a very precise understanding of German phonology and phonotactics. As in, I not only know right pronunciation from wrong, I give her detailed advice on how to match Duolingo’s model speaker that we can both tell is correct.

What makes this weird is that I don’t speak German. At all. Nor have I ever lived where it’s spoken; I’ve visited Germany once, German-speaking Switzerland once, and that’s it.

This raises questions in my mind:

1. How the fuck? I mean, I suppose it’s related to my knack for generating names in the style of any specified language, and I could handwave about Markov-chain models, but…how the fuck?

2. What dialect of German have I templated on? Could there be any way to tell?

3. What other entire language phonologies have I swallowed … without … me … actually … noticing …

4. Does this happen to other people?

The human brain is a very odd thing.

This is a brief heads-up that the reason I’ve been blog silent lately is that I’m concentrating hard on a sprint with what I consider a large payoff: getting the Emacs project fully converted to git. In retrospect, choosing Bazaar as DVCS was a mistake that has presented unnecessary friction costs to a lot of contributors. RMS gets this and we’re moving.

I’m also talking with RMS about the possibility that it’s time to shoot Texinfo through the head and go with a more modern, Web-friendly master format. Oh, and time to abolish info entirely in favor of HTML. He’s not entirely convinced yet of this, but he’s listening.

You might think “Huh? Emacs already has a git mirror. What else needs to be done?” Quite a lot, actually, starting with lifting Bazaar commit references into a form that will still make sense in a git log listing. Read the recent emacs-devel list archives if you’re really curious.

Fixing these things are important to me as part of a larger project: cracking Emacs out of an encrustation of practices and history that has made it seem insular and archaic to a lot of younger hackers who grew up with the faster pace and the techniques of the web.

RMS did too good a job. Because Emacs can be a total environment that you never have to step out of, the culture around it has tended to become inward-looking and hold on to habits that smell two decades old now.

My favorite quote about this is from Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings:

Emacs: Fangorn

Vast, ancient, gnarled and mostly impenetrable, tended by a small band of shepherds old as the world itself, under the command of their leader, Neckbeard. They possess unbelievable strength, are infuriatingly slow, and their land is entirely devoid of women. It takes forever to say anything in their strange, rumbling language.

Fortunately, RMS recognizes that this points at a real problem. Some of his senior devs don’t get it…

And if the idea of RMS and ESR cooperating to subvert Emacs’s decades-old culture from within strikes you as both entertaining and bizarrely funny…yeah, it is. Ours has always been a more complex relationship than most people understand.