Our community college French class is reading an extremely abbreviated adaptation of the "Hunchback of Notre Dame" novel, and I started reading the preface to get an idea of how this particular adaptation was done.  Each of the first two sentences has 5 commas, and the second sentence is 57 words long.  As I was despairing of ever reaching the subject and verb of this sentence, I exclaimed:  "This author sounds just like Victor Hugo!"

Yes, dear reader.  That preface was written by Victor Hugo.

P.S.  "How long is Notre-Dame de Paris" yields "Notre-Dame de Paris is approximately 128 meters (420 feet) long."  The answer I was looking for is "940 pages, in 3 volumes".  We're working with 127 pages, many of which are comprehension exercises.

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2014 was forever ago, and Gardner Dozois is no longer with us, but I just finished reading Nancy Kress' award-winning novella in his Year's Best anthology.  Yes, I would go.  The chance of six thousand lifetimes.

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6/6 '20 1 Comment
Noooo! He will be missed.
 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4227879-is-data-human-the-metaphysics-of-star-trek

I gave this book, "Is Data Human? The Metaphysics of Star Trek", to my friend Chris shortly before he died from complications of muscular dystrophy.  I don't know whether he had time to read it.

It ponders a lot of the philosophical conundrums inspired by Star Trek tech, such as androids and transporters.  Our friend Tom B. says that he's chill with the idea of being scanned, destroyed, and re-created as an identical copy.  But what if the process goes awry?  This happens to Commander Will Riker, who winds up with a "twin" eventually named Thomas.  Is the "duplicate" going to be just as sanguine about being destroyed to balance the equations?  What if it's unclear which copy is "excess"?

If you played Rock-Paper-Scissors with yourself to solve this problem, would you keep tying endlessly, or are you already different enough to make different choices?  If you're already different, are you really exact duplicates?

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3/24 '20 1 Comment
this thread is the definitive exploration of the subject:

https://twitter.com/StorySlug/status/1242077170043936769