Comment by TreyHarris

Hi, ceequof, the original author here. I agree with you completely in concept; it was a stupid thing to include and I should have cut it.

But as I wrote in the FAQ, I fired off that email in under an hour in reply to a fast-moving thread on an email list where people knew me by reputation and wouldn't question my skills; the totality of my "research" was trying to reproduce the original numbers from memory ("500 miles" stuck in my head, but the distances to the places I remembered pinging did not); and I didn't ask anyone else to edit it for me.

All of that would have been ridiculously unprofessional of me as a writer for something intended for as wide an audience as it went to. But I had no idea it would be forwarded so much and so often (nor so many years later, now decades after the original event!).

And that's why I really prefer it when people link to the canonical version I maintain at http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html with a link to the FAQ.