That said, Bujold's latest, The Sharing Knife, wasn't nearly as good as most of the rest of her stuff. I've not even read the second book, and I'm not sure I will.

Thanks for the note. I do have e-mail notification turned on for replies to my comments, at a much lower threshold than +3. :)

My browsing at +3 is not an indication of my "faith in the moderation system" so much as it is an indication of my limited time. I can only afford to read these comments in so much depth. When I get really interested in a thread, I turn down the threshold to take a closer look.

I actually skimmed these comments at a threshold of 0. I did miss your posted corrections from John (sorry!), but that's only because there were >400 comments and I was moving pretty fast.

There is an eternal tradeoff between efficiency and fidelity. In medicine, we refer to the tradeoff between sensitivity (finding something important) and specificity (not finding something unimportant). It's kind of the same here, and I have chosen specificity over sensitivity.

I'll contact John.