IJ footnotes

[Paul Mackin]

Not just footnotes to deal with, but footnotes to footnotes. 

Seem to serve a variety of purposes, but for me the most important
was providing a way to finish up reading the book. This is assuming
you saved them until the end as I mainly did. I'd have 
been a bit discombobulated without something to move on to after that 
"unpopped push" the text proper ends on. (Not that there was
any really clearcut "top of the stack" (current time)  to return to, as a 
more conventional story or unbusted computer program would have done.)

The longer (multipage) footnotes really did clarify a few things, didn't
they? And these clarification felt like they _belonged_ at the
end of the book. It didn't seem at all necessary to know the place in the 
body of the text they applied to. It was maddening if you _did_ want to 
look back. They should have given some kind of crossreferrencing. 

One footnote that intrigued me was 123 (p. 1023). It's some kind of 
derivation of the stats for the Eschaton game. I didn't attempt to go 
through the arithmetic but I have the feeling there is probably a pretty 
good joke hidden there. Maybe someone on the list who finds reading math 
relatively easy could go though it and enlighten us?

Sometimes a footnote is used not to explain the source of something,
but to deny the possibility of an explanation. Sometimes the denial
seems perverse--a bit of anti-erudition. Like where it is claimed
that the meaning of ALGOL is unknown. Can't remember where this occurred
but it struck me a funny. Maybe I am missing the point of something.

					P.